English language
Do elephants dance?
It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that,…
Lightbulb moments
Last Saturday on Radio 2 Claudia Winkleman was inaugurated as the host of what was formerly Graham Norton’s mid-morning spot.…
Concept
‘It was nothing special, but it was a pub,’ said my husband, looking up from his copy of Bar magazine…
Exclamation marks
‘Like eating in the street,’ said my husband. Astonishing! He’d said something not only coherent in itself but also connected…
Sadiq Khan’s virtues
The new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he wanted ‘the most transparent, honest and accessible administration London has ever…
Shakespeare’s pronunciation
Sir John Harington told a story in 1596 about a lady at court asking her gentlewoman to inquire which Mr…
Queue
The language that President Barack Obama used was evidence of skulduggery, Nigel Farage declared. ‘The UK is gonna be in…
Sex worker
‘Of course,’ said my husband in his worst smirky way, as though waiting for an appreciative chuckle, ‘as soon as…
Illegitimate
‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill’s last private secretary,’ Charles Moore…
Dreadlocks
‘Why are you filming this?’ ‘For everyone’s safety.’ Those are the last words in a 46-second video that was watched…
Gender fluid
Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid…
Cock
On the Radio 4 news at 11 o’clock last Saturday morning there was a joky report about roosters in Brisbane. The…
Why ‘my’?
There’s a plague of first-person advertising
Leap in the dark
‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus,’ sang my husband flatly, ‘when he said the world was round.’ I wasn’t going…
Special status
‘Special status?’ said my husband. ‘You mean like executioners, butchers and undertakers in Japan?’ I hadn’t suggested that, but had…
Creaky voice
My husband, not surprisingly, finds it extremely annoying. It, in this instance, is the use by women of creaky voice.…
Beware
My husband pointed with his stick, which he carries not to steady himself but to cudgel pedestrians out of his…
Not even a thing
Last summer Kim Kardashian, who already had a daughter called North (surname West), announced that she was expecting a boy.…
Peak
Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble…
Chattering classes
When the much missed Frank Johnson (1943–2006), once editor of The Spectator, wrote in 1980 that ‘the peculiar need for…
Why ‘safe’ is Dot Wordsworth’s word of the year
‘Makes me feel sick,’ said my husband, referring not to the third mince pie of the morning (in Advent, supposedly…
The rise of the man bun, the Mancan and man boobs
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he had learnt to laugh by reading Twitter. ‘Now they’ve got falsies.’ He…
Lessons in jargon
Schools are becoming addicted to acronyms. It’s not just silly, it’s dangerous
Is ‘female’ still an insult?
‘More deadly than the male,’ said my husband archly. He was knowingly quoting Kipling, though I don’t know why he…
How we ended up ‘cisgender’
‘That’s not how you spell “system”,’ said my husband triumphantly, pointing with his whisky glass at a placard inveighing against…
