When did this fashion start, by the way, for a “word of the year”? The OED has just made “selfie” the word of 2013. What won in, say, 1840; what would that teach us about Britain? The Penny Post was launched, so was “Stamp” all the rage? The great novelist Fanny Burney died, so maybe– […]

Young people, eh? They’re always changing the meaning of words. When I was a youngster, “sick” meant ill; now it means good. “Ill” also means good, or more accurately doubly good – something is “ill” if it’s really cool. “Mad” is now used to mean lots – if someone has “mad style” that means they […]

The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. (George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1946.) This week in London, the annual George Orwell Lecture was given by the Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan. Where is one to start? George Orwell was against religious censorship. Tariq Ramadan campaigned successfully to cancel a production […]

Stop it. Stop saying “the global race”. It sounds like a round-the-world yachting competition. It is stupid, implying a zero-sum situation in which if China gets better we have to get worse. And it’s boring. You’ve used it a million times. Stop saying “hard-working people”, or, God forbid, “hard-working families”. It is cruel and exclusionary […]

Stupid because-I-say-so prescriptivism in The Atlantic and The New York Times over the word “Gif”. “The war is won, even if the battle ensues. GIF is pronounced with a soft G, and if you think otherwise, you are wrong,” sniffs The Atlantic, its nose hoisted well into the air. The NYT agrees: “A GIF, pronounced […]