The Social World

Author: Dot Wordsworth

  • What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

    What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

    “What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase?

    The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’”

    I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later. In Pickwick, fresh is used three to one in the sense of “new” – a fresh bottle of wine or a fresh pipe of tobacco. To use new would have been less unambiguous, for the wine was not new and nor was the pipe; it was another helping of the same thing.

    In Great Expectations, fresh is used predominantly in the “fresh air” sense, with the exception of fresh bandages and with the terror fresh upon me (where it is an adverb). But the old man in Pickwick didn’t think of fresh misery as a set phrase. Nor did the author of a sentence in an American newspaper in 1873 when he wrote: “Such a course in Rapides will simply organize a fresh hell here.”

    The dictionary rightly expresses caution when considering early uses of gold star, for example, in the sense of a thing “awarded as a prize or in recognition of an achievement, especially good work or behavior by a young schoolchild.” This it finds from 1886, but it discounts a citation from 1661, “a snowy Mantle which gold Stars did deck,” because that does not represent a fixed collocation.

    I’m not convinced that the OED needed a new entry for fresh hell. It may most often be used now as an echo of Parker, but a dictionary of English is not a dictionary of quotations.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • What makes a ‘survivor?’

    What makes a ‘survivor?’

    Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: “I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise.

    Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,” wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual “grooming?” Are they victims or are they survivors? Or should they be neither?

    Last week, after he withdrew his name for consideration as the chair of Britain’s national grooming inquiry, the thoughtful retired policeman Jim Gamble made a comment using both terms: “The police have understandably lost the trust of victims and survivors because some were corrupt.”

    In 2021, this sense of survivor was noticed by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “A person who has experienced a traumatic event or past abuse, especially of a sexual or psychological nature.”

    In 1975 there was an example in the Los Angeles Free Press: “Welcome all survivors of rape, child molestation, welfare lines, botched abortions, unemployment and typing pools.” There’s a certain bathos in “typing pools,” oppressive as they might have been. As for victim, in the sense of “a person who has been intentionally harmed, injured, or killed,” the OED notes that “in some contexts survivor is now used in preference to victim.”

    There has been a recent trend to turn misfortune into victimhood, as in the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter campaigns. Donald Trump presents his prosecutions as evidence of his victimhood, but when a bullet nicks his ear, he brands himself a survivor.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Should you mix whisky and potash?

    Should you mix whisky and potash?

    “‘I am not screwed,’ replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. ‘Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.’ So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.”

    By screwed he meant “drunk” of course. The Caterpillar is the nickname of a pupil in The Hill (1905) by Horace Annesley Vachell about boys at an English boarding school, more particularly the love between them.

    The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F. Marion Crawford, in a scene in Baden-Baden, we hear of an English duke drinking “curaçao and potass water.” Crawford was an American man who settled in Italy. Curiously, potassium carbonate is used in glassmaking and his death was attributed to his inhalation a decade earlier of toxic gases at a glassworks in Colorado.

    But far more remarkable to me than that small chime of potassium references is that the word potassium derives from the earthy English word potash. “I discovered sodium a few days after I discovered potassium, in the year 1807,” Humphry Davy noted in 1812. So it is true that, as it says in the first clerihew ever composed by Edmund Clerihew Bentley:

    Sir Humphry Davy
    Abominated gravy.
    He lived in the odium
    Of having discovered sodium.

    It is not as simple as Sir Humphry Latinizing potash by calling it potassium. The leached remnants of wood or vegetable ashes were called in Germanic languages pot-asschen (Dutch) or pottasche (German). Romance languages borrowed the words as potasse (French) or potasa (Spanish). Davy succeeded in separating the metallic element potassium from the compound.

    But the symbol K for the element, short for kalium, derives from the Arabic al-qali (from qala, “to bake”) in use from the Middle Ages for potash, which gives us alkali.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Is something ‘greenlit’ – or ‘greenlighted?’

    Is something ‘greenlit’ – or ‘greenlighted?’

    “It’s got to be greenlighted,” said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using –greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the London Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when “he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb.”

    For what it’s worth, my husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated, one says moonlit, sunlit, lamplit, firelit. When using a figure of speech accidentally employing the word light, such as to moonlight, then one says moonlighted, not moonlit.

    I fear language does not abide by logic. In which category would you put highlight? The verb is definitely to my mind highlighted, as the past tense or past participle. Yet the Oxford English Dictionary states that highlit is an established form of the past tense, though it gives no examples among the quotations it furnishes, while giving five quotations with high-lighted. In any case, greenlight, first recorded in 1941, had certainly acquired the form greenlit as well as greenlighted by the 1960s.

    The first references to a green light on the railways come from 1839. But then, a green light still meant “caution,” and red “stop.” White was used for “all right.” But, as colored lights de-pended on the glass fitted to a lamp, the danger remained that a red or green glass might fall from a lamp and leave a false white signal.

    A parallel case to greenlight is gaslight, which I have written about before. It derives from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) and means “to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity.” It is often now reduced to meaning “disagree (with us)” or “suggest that we are mistaken.” Whatever gaslighted meant metaphorically, it was never in the form gaslit. I couldn’t greenlight that.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • My discontent over ‘content’

    My discontent over ‘content’

    Dame Anna Wintour, with her rather marvelous bob hairdo, recently became chief content officer for Condé Nast. I had forgotten that a couple of years ago she was appointed a Companion of Honour – one of those interesting people King Charles III likes to have for lunch. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d written here about content. “That is probably not a sign of dementia,” said my husband encouragingly.

    Why is content such an unpleasant label for articles in a magazine? After all, the title page of the Great Bible, ordered to be published by Henry VIII in 1539, read: “The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy Scrypture, bothe of the olde and newe testament.” Still, no one ever thought of Moses as a content-provider.

    I suppose the trouble is the parallel with the contents of a barrel of sprats or the contents of my lifesaving handbag. Even so, 19th-century critics liked to distinguish between form and content. The great leap forward came with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. In 1991, a journalist wrote: “Microsoft is purchasing content – books, artwork and video properties – that can be used in products once multimedia computing is established.” The internet was the medium; it only needed the message.

    Newspapers had always required editorial matter to put between adverts (although in magazines such as Exchange & Mart or the Lady they were the attraction). This matter was called copy. “More Copie, More Copie; we lose a great deale of time for want of Text,” wrote playwright and poet Thomas Nashe. In the 20th century, copywriters were devoted to advertising, an even more vulgar trade than journalism. Each generation has a fashion in language as much as in its bobs and fringes. The BBC favored the Orwellian-sounding controller. I think there was a Controller of the Spoken Word. Now we get content officers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • What does the ‘100’ emoji really mean?

    What does the ‘100’ emoji really mean?

    When this century began, we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely.

    But now I reach for my throwing-slippers when someone on the radio says: “One hundred percent.” It can be a hundred percent, hundred percent or (in the mouth of Gen Z) hundo P.

    Even odder is the development of an emoji with its own meanings. I had supposed that 100 meant 100 percent, implying agreement. But the immediate figurative reference is to examination marks (which to be sure are 100 percent when the mark is 100). So the emoji implies full marks for the interlocutor, not absolute agreement by the writer.

    This emoji is labeled U+1F4AF by Unicode, the system that enables characters and scripts (168 of them, from Old Uyghur to Samaritan) to be used online. Unicode is also to blame for the lamentable use of emoticons online as a substitute for words. Unicode encodes 3,790 emojis, some I admit quite useful, such as the waning gibbous moon symbol.

    Arabic numerals such as 100 are already translingual. There is no need to vocalize them in any particular language: you don’t have to say to yourself “hundred” or “cien” when reading one. But the “hundred points symbol” has two main figurative meanings: either “Full marks” or “Keep it real.” If someone had said “Keep it real” to me, I’d have thought it a criticism, like “Don’t be daft.” But it is regarded as friendly support, in the sense of “Keep authentic and truthful.”

    In India, more charmingly because less familiarly, they still use cent per cent, an old-fashioned way of saying completely. The Indians speak of “a cent per cent success,” but if I said that, it would increase the percentage of blank stares I receive.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Where did ‘husband’ come from?

    Where did ‘husband’ come from?

    “Am I housebound?” asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role.

    “No, darling,” I said. “You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.” Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank in worth with the years, following the same path as boor, churl and peasant.

    Whereas I as a housewife enjoy a comparatively transparent label, any husband’s title is obscure. It is simply a house-bond, but the first element of husband, hus-, no longer seems like house, and the -bond element is often mistaken for a form of bond, to do with binding.

    The bond in husband derives from words in Norse languages with related meanings “to live, dwell, to cultivate, to build.” Old English had a connected word, buan, “to dwell,” and these all came from the ancient Indo-European word that gave us be, as well as the Latin fui and the Greek stem phu- (hence physics). The history of the English word be finds cousins in Persian, Russian and Irish.

    Before the Norman Conquest, bonda in English meant a freeman, like a ceorl (churl), below a noble thane but above a servile worker. After the Normans came, the churl sank from freeman to a tenant bound to a lord, and bonde in Middle English became equivalent to a villein or serf, and then to a slave. It was at this stage that the word became confused with bond as in bondage. In husband, the fossilized -band was insulated from these developments in meaning.

    Husbandry meant at first management of a household, an obsolete sense, of which we retain only husbanding of resources. Husbandry was the task of a husbandman, cultivating the soil. The husband as master of the house came to mean the correlative of a housewife, to whom he’d be married. Strangely, some men in the Middle Ages, such as Richard Husewif (1192), had the word as a surname; perhaps it was taken as a role independent of sex. My husband couldn’t be mistaken for one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.