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Dot Wordsworth

Dot Wordsworth

The Spectator

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Mind your language / The Twelve Hates of Christmas

sunday 7

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Mind your language / Is ‘Chinatown’ offensive?

I’ve heard people using back-to-back housing to mean terraces separated by back yards. But strictly, back-to-back houses are built against a party...

21.11.2024 20

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Mind your language / Does ‘tummy’ turn your stomach?

‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising...

03.11.2024 30

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Mind your language / What does ‘maidan’ have to do with cricket?

Freddie Flintoff recently called the Maidan ‘the home of cricket’. For supporters of Ukraine’s independence, the Maidan saw continual...

10.09.2024 5

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Mind your language / When did monkeypox become ‘mpox’?

Writing about monkeypox in The Spectator in May 2022, Douglas Murray repeated a formula he had put forward in 2020, explaining ‘the problem with us...

01.09.2024 10

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Mind your language / The summer of Brat

The singer Charli XCX (or ‘Ninety Ten’ as my husband insists on pronouncing it) has endorsed Kamala Harris, in a way. ‘Kamala is brat,’ she...

03.08.2024 6

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Mind your language / Is Donald Trump a ‘badass’?

Logan Paul, a wrestler with 23 million YouTube subscribers, called Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to his shooting ‘the most badass thing I’ve...

22.07.2024 10

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Mind your language / Who came up with the analogy of carrying a Ming vase?

‘Evelyn Waugh,’ said my husband when I asked who came up with the analogy of carrying a Ming vase. He was, in a way, right, but wrong too. Every...

23.06.2024 10

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Mind your language / Being asked to ‘bear with’ is unbearable

‘Bear with me,’ said my husband on the phone and then let out a loud roar. It was intended to be the sound of the bear with him. There are no...

06.06.2024 10

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Mind your language / The myth of the global majority

‘You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,’ sang my husband with execrable delivery. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You can’t sing things like that now. In...

26.05.2024 10

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Mind your language / Can MPs really defect? 

‘He did it years before William Donaldson did The Henry Root Letters,’ said my husband querulously, as though I had accused him on peak-time...

05.05.2024 40

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Mind your language / Amol Rajan is right to change his ways on ‘aitch’

My husband thought it brave and manly of the BBC’s Amol Rajan to resolve publicly to change his pronunciation of the letter-name aitch. He’d said...

21.04.2024 10

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Mind your language / Are hyenas really relatable?

A new television wildlife series called Queens (the ruling kind, not the screaming kind) shows competition among hyenas that involves infanticide....

16.03.2024 10

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Mind your language / What are frameworks for?

A brand new ‘robust’ framework was being woven and nailed together, so the Prime Minister announced at the end of last week. It’s barely a year...

10.03.2024 9

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Mind your language / Are cosmonauts really Russian?

Oleg Kononenko has been in space since 15 September last year and has just broken the cumulative record for time in orbit of 879 days. Being Russian...

15.02.2024 30

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Mind your language / The genteel roots of dunking

When I was a girl, it was bad manners to dunk a biscuit. Then I went abroad and found that Italian biscotti could scarcely be consumed in any other...

18.01.2024 10

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Mind your language / Why are quotes so often misattributed? 

‘Macmillan,’ said my husband with rare succinctness. Someone on the wireless had just asked who it was who said: ‘Events, dear boy.’ I agreed...

27.12.2023 20

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