Why do you use the spelling ‘etiket’? I have found no other reference to that spelling anywhere. It seems either to be affectation, or ignorance.
James Whitten, London
Archons of Athens! It is just a wet joke at the expense of sticklers for spelling as we pronounce. One should not make jokes, especially wet ones, in print. They are likely to annoy the readers, and be held against you. Ditto to irony; one should never use it. Half the readers will misunderstand it. But I do. I do. Alas and dammit.
Outside our back door we have a paved area with steps leading up to the lawn. My husband and I call it a patio. But posh friends tell us that it is actually a terrace (which is clearly pretentious rubbish). What in fact is it?
Diana Eden, London SW17
A patio was originally an inner court, open to the sky, in a Spanish or Spanish-American house. In suburbia it has become the name for a paved area belonging to a house, and usually adjoining it. So you and your posh friends are both sort of right. Have you thought of switching to loggia? Portico? Piazza? Patio, schmatio. I should call it what you will.
Is there a correct or proper way of saying that you are ‘living in sin’ with someone, which signifies the same commitment as marriage? My partner and I have lived together for three years without any plans (yet) to marry and to all intents and purposes we are committed for life. Yet on official documents such as CVs we must put ‘single’ when asked about our marital status.
Rachel Eades, address withheld
Partner is the increasingly common descriptive noun, less twee than ‘significant other’ or ‘boy/girlfriend’. I quite fancy ‘lover’ or even ‘leman’. Those who are not officially married cannot claim marital status on official forms. However, officialdom is shifting ground on this slippery question of status, as the Army has just shown by allowing those who are not formally married to share beds.
Does the conditional ‘if’ have any place in a proper apology? I was taught that it implied a reservation like: ‘I don’t think I did anything wrong but…’
Frank Tapson, Devon
An apology with the defensive clause ‘If anybody took offence…’ is only half an apology. Christian theology has a structure for apologies, involving repentance, remorse, restitution, contrition and so on. A conditional or hypothetical apology is hardly worth the hot air that pronounces it. Merely from a prudential point of view an apology would have saved both Prince Harry and Tony Blair a lot of trouble.
What is ‘tugging the forelock’ and does anyone still do it? And when is it appropriate to lift one’s cap?
George S., Banbury
In days when hats were more generally worn, who uncovered his head to whom was a question of profound etiquette. Almost as important as the number of angels who can dance on the point of a pin. The Duc de Saint-Simon, who was sensitive about his plebeian origins, wrote a book of 100,000 words entirely devoted to the question of who uncovers or tugs forelock to whom. Those without a hat or cap signalled deference by touching or tugging their forelocks. It is a kind of salute. To raise one’s cap or hat, or to touch its brim, is an appropriate gesture of greeting to friends, acquaintances and even strangers.
My colleagues and I have regular heated discussions about when you should use the terms ‘dinner’ or ‘supper’. Could you please clarify?
Alice Liverton, London
This is a regional and class semantic difference. Dinner has always been the name for the chief meal of the day, and this used to be taken around midday. But professionalism and the Industrial Revolution meant that most people went out to work, and ate their main meal of the day in the evening. In the old industrial districts, dinner still means the midday meal. And ‘tea’ is high tea. Not scones, with cream and strawberry jam in mid-afternoon, but supper. To describe the midday meal as dinner is a working-class banner. But note the interesting archaism: the midday meal at schools is still universally described as school dinner. It is polite to use the dinner/supper semantics of your district, tribe and friends.
Please comment on the usage ‘man or lady.’ Why not ‘man or woman’? Or ‘gentleman or lady’?
Elsa Yates, Broxburn
Why not, indeed? Both lady and gentleman are threatened species in our obsessively egalitarian age. When would anybody of any sensitivity use the prefix ‘lady’, except when referring to somebody ennobled by birth or peerages for purchase? Only when referring to somebody whom the Victorians would have considered not a lady at all. As in ‘cleaning lady’. I agree that we should share the sauce for the gander and the goose equally. ‘Men and women’ or ‘ladies and gents’. I think that the latter has period charm.
What does one do with a form? I insist it should be ‘filled in’ but a work colleague says his are ‘filled out’. Today, I heard someone ask who had ‘populated’ a form.
Ian Adams, Brierley Hill
One man’s idiom is another man’s peculiarity is another man’s solecism. I ‘fill in’ a form, groaning at the labour. Dickens and The Times wrote ‘fill up’ a form. I have never met ‘populated’. So long as we can understand somebody’s idiom, we must sigh and get on with the melancholy business of sucking our pencils and staring wistfully at foul forms.
Why do some television weather forecasters, among many others, preface their remarks with ‘Hello there’? Where did the expression come from? And is it acceptable in modern society?
I. A. G. Thomson, Cranbrook, Kent
It comes from a wish to be inclusive, not pompous, in our Age of Informality. This is a powerful social tide, which also refers to everybody by their first names, whether we have met them before or not. Let us try not to be irritated by the fools in this drained-down medium. Watch less television. Greet others with cheerful platitudes appropriate to them and you. Swim with the tide, but not in the forefront of it.
What have you got against Charlies? You seem to use my name as a term of abuse.
Charles Knighton, Chelmsford
Some of my best friends are called Charlie. Charlie/Charley has been used down the ages in British English as:
- A nightwatchman.
- A small pointed beard (after King Charles I).
- A fox (Tom Brown’s Schooldays).
- The nap on glossy cloth.
- A gold watch (pun on sense 1).
- A hunchback (who was said to carry his little brother Charley on his back), hence
- A military haversack.
- The nickname of anyone called Beresford (after Admiral Lord Charles Beresford).
- Reveille (Navy, ‘Charley! Charley! Get up and wash yourself’).
- Charley Ronce, a ponce.
- A male homosexual.
- A chamber pot.
- A fool or softie, Cockney, widespread in phrases such as ‘a proper Charlie’.
- Charlie Hunt, the female pudendum.
- Your Charlie equals Your Girl.
- A bottle of Carlsberg beer.
There are other variants, etymology obscure. I overuse it in sense 13.
Can you help me on the usage of the word ‘excoriate’? I know it is the term used by the medical profession for scratching but it is more commonly used to mean ‘criticise severely’. My 1964 Oxford Concise gives only the former meaning but my 1979 Oxford paperback gives both. When exactly did we start criticising people by scratching them?
Patrick Arbuthnot, Amersham
Excoriate originally meant to pull off the skin or hide (from a man or beast). But such a word was never going to keep a single meaning. By the seventeenth century excoriate was acquiring transferred and figurative meanings. For example, 1633: ‘Though wrongs excoriate the heart.’
It is an indisputable fact that the water closet was invented by the sanitary pioneer Thomas Crapper. Is it permissible to refer to the mechanism and housing as ‘the crapper’ or would this represent an all-out assault on decorum?
Robert Randell, London SE26
Etymologically and as an eponym, crapper is correct. Socially, it is coarse. OK for small boys and Rugga Buggas. The name we give to the necessary convenience essential for all mortals is a potent class indicator in southern England. ‘Toilet’ is lower class. ‘Loo’ is middle class and has become twee. ‘Bog’ is schoolboy. ‘Lavvy’ is schoolgirl. ‘Gents’, ‘ladies’ and ‘WC’ are fairly neutral. Americans say ‘john’. These are problematic and socially charged semantics.
Please explain the correct etiquette for signing off letters.
Mary Davis, Lancaster
Pompously, to the Editor of The Times or one’s commanding officer: ‘I have the honour, Sir, to remain your obedient servant’ (an economy with the truth). To business firms: ‘Yours faithfully’. To private persons: ‘Yours sincerely’. To a person known slightly: ‘Yours truly’ or, more cordially, ‘Yours very truly’. To a friend: ‘Yours ever’. For Scots: ‘Yours aye’. Variants: ‘Best regards’, ‘All good wishes’. To good friends: ‘Lotsa luv and kisses’. There is considerable variation in these formulae. The postmodernist trend is towards informality and self-referential irony.
Please explain for me the distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’. It is driving me mad.
Ann Lawson, Leeds
The ‘rule’ is that few/fewer go with things that you can count. ‘Less’ goes with uncountables: fewer peas, less sugar. So, applying this rule, how about: My house is ‘fewer’ than five (countable) miles from the station. So it takes a taxi ‘fewer’ than twenty (countable) miles to get there. And it costs me ‘fewer’ than five (countable) pounds. Eh? In each case less is idiomatic. Ah well. Less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns in certain circs. How many miles to Babylon? Less than a thousand. How many wise men in Babylon? Fewer than three. ‘Like’ has taken the place of ‘as if’. ‘Less’ tips ‘fewer’ out: less pedestrians; less immigrants. Good luck.
Your reference to ‘shag dress’ (30 Aug) foxed me. I haven’t been able to find it in a dictionary, and Google is not much help. My wife suggests a frock made from a type of carpet, but I suspect she’s just being droll. Please elucidate.
Paul Maitland, Tunbridge Wells
Schoolboy slang. Shag means ‘sloppy, idle, casual, unkempt’. Sorry.
Why is there an increase in the use of the word ‘I’ when it should be ‘me’? When visiting Pakistan, Prince Charles thanked the people for giving such a wonderful welcome to ‘my wife and I…’ Do some people think it is posh?
The Rev. Frank Parkinson, Faringdon
‘Between you and I…’ is a solecism. Anyone who uses it lives in a grammarless desert, in which no distinction is recognised between a grammatical object and a subject. When ‘I’ is the second member of an objective phrase (e.g. ‘He drove Margaret and I home’), ‘I’ would not be used (one hopes) if it were not preceded by a first object. ‘He drove I home’? There is uncertainty, and ‘I’ is felt by the grammatically insecure to sound safer.
In my youth some people were fat. Now they are obese. Why?
Brian Dagnall, Boldre, Hants
Fatty Falstaff! This may be partly a love of the long word over the short, and preference of the Latin word before the Teutonic. There may be a tendency not to be judgemental: we are far less cruel than our predecessors. English is the most fertile language because it has so many synonyms. And no word carries the same baggage as its synonym.
Please advise on the correct pronunciation of scone. And Evelyn.
Andrew Barnes, Stokesley
These are deep waters, Watson. Should scone rhyme with ‘gone’ or ‘bone’? Is Evelyn ‘Everlyn’ for a gel, and ‘Eevelyn’ for a chap, as in Waugh? You could try a theory that scone/gone is U, and scone/bone is non-U. But it doesn’t work completely. You could try that scone/gone is southern, and scone/bone northern. But that doesn’t work exactly. The best recourse is to spread your scone with Cornish clotted cream and raspberry jam, and let the pronunciation go hang. And to treat Everlyn/Eevelyn amiably, whatever her/his sex. We should try to pronounce in the way of our family and friends; and to write with the best. Time and reputable publication determine the best writers, don’t they?
How did the word ‘toilet’ come to mean lavatory? Why has society become pseudo-refined in some ways when it is so coarse in others?
Ida Staples, Houghton
The name for the necessary room is a notorious bog of euphemism, genteelism, snobbery, coyness and allusion. The word chosen is a powerful class indicator. Toilet is widely scorned as lower middle class. Gents and ladies are pretty neutral. Heads is US and naval. Many euphemisms are silly. Hostess to visiting Texan as she opens the door to him: ‘Would you like to wash your hands?’ Texan: ‘No, thank you, Ma’am. I just washed them on your rosebed.’
I look forward each Saturday to reading a well-known columnist’s replies to queries on modern manners. I admire his thoughtful answers, but am less enthusiastic when he illustrates a point with a Latin phrase and then finds it necessary to translate it. I am not against the use of Latin phrases, but I do feel they must stand alone. Furthermore, it does smack of condescension to add the translation, implying that the reader is not on the same intellectual level. It may be regarded by some as contra bonos mores. How can I advise the columnist of this without giving offence?
Group Captain R. L. S. Coulson, Market Harborough
A daily newspaper is a great lake in which intellectual elephants can swim and lambs can paddle. Accordingly, the columnist is a Blondin, treading a tightrope over Victoria Falls between obscurity and triviality, condescension and ostentation, and often falling into the foaming minestrone. We can no longer assume that readers, even of The Times, read their Virgil in bed. I should write to the poor fool, sine ira et studio.