The Social World

Category: And Finally

  • Down with exclamation points!

    Down with exclamation points!

    Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation.

    Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.” As far as I can work out, nothing has changed since. Reviewing, gloomily, my own record of “Hope that helps!” or “Yes please!” I find this is less to do with enthusiasm than with a desire to please, or at least a desire not to seem pushy. I’ve just sent someone a message saying, “Get ahead of the herd” (I meant, “Just get on with it”) and I’ve had to stop myself putting in an exclamation mark to take the sting out of being bossy. Now he probably does think I’m bossy. Then I ask myself whether the silverback males I know use punctuation the same way and the answer is: nope.

    Kisses, or Xs, serve something of the same purpose, with the difference that women mostly use them with other women. Xs are another marker of non-aggression. They say: friend, I come in peace, even though I may be complaining or telling you what to do. It’s a bit like how younger people use the Australian uplift at the end of sentences, turning every statement into a question. It’s a way of avoiding seeming dogmatic or assertive – but that’s generational rather than gendered.

    One friend has beaten me to austere punctuation. “Nowadays when I write to men,” she says, “I am brief, unapologetic and focused on the message. This is a recent thing. I realized that for as long as I have been writing to other people, I had thought I needed to charm them. I thought this was what everyone wanted. They don’t, particularly men.” She’s now binary in her communications: entirely dispassionate or psychotically overnuanced.

    There is a place for charm in written social intercourse in which punctuation plays a role, but part of the problem of contemporary interaction is that our categories are now blurred. We write to our bank manager (if we’ve got one) with the same easy informality as to a close friend. We’ve gone from “Dear Madam” to “Hi Melanie” (a very tetchy message to me from a police press office began that way), and we sign off with “Cheers” in both contexts, which means we use with colleagues or superiors the same sort of formula we’d use socially. It’s the democratization of communication, and it’s confusing. Perhaps we should stop being ingratiating – exclamation points and kisses are just that – and go for plainness if that’s what’s needed. “Please” and “thank you” work well – though again, it’s all about nuance.

    As for the other trick to ensure you don’t sound dogmatic, ellipses, I wonder if they’re gendered too. These are deep waters…

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

  • 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.

  • Cheers to corkscrews!

    Cheers to corkscrews!

    For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630, but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I attended, with everyone desperately trying to open bottles using keys, pens, knives etc. Or using that technique where you bang the bottle against a wall with the heel of a shoe. Halcyon days. More likely the Cavaliers would have just taken the top off cleanly with a swift blow from a saber.

    Early devices for extracting corks were called “bottle screws.” According to wine writer Hugh Johnson, the word “corkscrew” was first used in 1720. From there, this handy little piece of equipment has conquered the world, from early versions which were simply a piece of metal with a wooden handle to the full nerdery of the $130 Screwpull – beloved by wine bores of a certain vintage. The most common one when I was taking my first steps as a wine drinker was the metal man with his hands up, which usually just drilled a hole in the cork rather than removing it. As someone who has opened thousands of bottles of wine, I can safely say that the best corkscrew is a good quality waiter’s friend. I never leave home without one.

    If you want to see the sheer imagination and thought humans have put in to removing a bit of tree bark from a glass receptacle, I’d highly recommend visiting the corkscrew museum (yes, there really is one, I literally have the T-shirt) at Domaine Gerovassiliou near Thessaloniki in Greece. There are corkscrews with winged demons on, others that look like medieval torture devices and some that fit into the top of walking canes, so a gentleman need never be without one.

    But at some point, will this essential piece of drinker’s kit be seen only in a museum? A report from kitchenware retailer Lakeland says just over a quarter of British 18- to 24-year-olds own a corkscrew – compared with 81 percent of over-65s. I’m not entirely sure this is the killer statistic everyone thinks it is, though. One in four youngsters having a corkscrew means you’re in with a good chance of finding one in shared accommodation. We didn’t all have corkscrews when I was in my early twenties. But I did. I was a budding wine bore.

    There’s no doubt, however, that the traditional cork is dying out, thanks to the ubiquitous screw cap. This has gone from being seen only on the cheapest wines to an entirely respectable way to close a bottle, especially in the Antipodes. Something like 70 percent of Australian and 95 percent of New Zealand wines are sealed this way. Screw caps are more reliable, too. It’s estimated that between 3 and 8 percent of  corks are tainted with a compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) which produces the characteristic “corked” smell of damp basements. Extremely annoying when you’ve been keeping a bottle for a special occasion.

    And yet for all its occasional unreliability, I’ll miss the cork when it finally disappears. A large part of the appeal of wine is the ritual of opening the bottle, the satisfying pop followed by the gurgle of the pour. It all builds anticipation. Now, where did I put my corkscrew?

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

  • How to survive a Chinese banquet

    When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would be attending. Do not sit next to the host, I was told. I was to find out why.

    Learning the rituals of banquets is an essential part of doing business in China. I was treated to at least one every day on a ten-day trip around the country – and sometimes two or three. There is no such thing as a casual business lunch. Any meal will turn into a semiformal event held in a private room and hosted by the most senior person in the organization.

    The meal starts slowly, with a few rather unappealing cold dishes laid out on a lazy Susan that sits on a round table, though initially no one sits down. The host will welcome everyone and dominate the conversation, mostly talking in Chinese to his or her colleagues. Then suddenly, without any overt signal, everyone sits down.

    Drinks are offered, usually in the form of a tiny glass and a small jug filled with a transparent liquid. A second warning: go slowly because this is rice wine, which can be as much as 50 proof. The custom is then for all to clink glasses and down the first round.

    Meanwhile, other more appetizing dishes appear, sometimes so numerous that the staff struggle to squeeze them onto the lazy Susan. This gets to be more and more of a problem as no dish seems ever to be finished. That’s partly because there is always far too much food, but also because empty dishes are likely to be instantly refilled.

    No one seems to order the food. It just arrives, either because there is a secret menu or it has been organized beforehand. The dishes are varied but first you need to understand the drinking process, which continues throughout the meal. After the initial drink or so, people get up at random intervals and walk over to another guest, welcome each other and clink glasses. This goes on throughout the meal, with people making sure they have greeted every other guest at least once and usually several times. Being able to hold your drink – and chopsticks – are considered impressive feats.

    The fare ranges from cold meats and plain vegetables to every possible combination of meat, fish, tofu and seafood in sauces from the bland to the burning hot.

    Here’s where the seating advice comes in. If you sit next to the host, they will ply you with portions of every dish, however obscure. It was the sea snails I found the hardest to stomach. I had seen them alive in the restaurant entrance, finger-sized slugs with disconcertingly human-looking mouths, their only organ apart from an anus, struggling to breathe in a bowl of water.

    Away from the host, you can ignore the more exotic dishes and concentrate on the fabulous ones that suit your taste. These seem never to stop coming, so eat slowly and leave room for more. Just as you are flagging, out comes the pièce de résistance, often a whole fish in a lavish sauce. Finally the dumplings arrive, familiar to dim sum diners but tastier. There may then be a small bowl of rice, though not always, and to round off, a small fruity dessert or just pieces of fruit, but desserts do not seem to be a common feature and I never saw a lychee. Nevertheless, no one ever leaves hungry.

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

  • Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

    Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

    The late Pope Francis hated gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisors last year, he warned that it is “an evil that destroys social life.” It wasn’t the first time he’d attacked rumor-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because “he or she throws a bomb and leaves.”

    His condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a “notorious gossip.” I vehemently reject the charge, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee-houses, picking up gossip for stories. Coffee-houses had become so hated by the establishment that Charles II denounced them as “places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers.”

    Rumor has it that the first example of gossip dates back to 1500 BC. According to the journalist Roger Wilkes, who wrote a history of scandal, cuneiform tablets describe a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. While the details remain unclear – Mesopotamian languages are hard to interpret – this anecdote suggests that humans have always been fascinated by the lives of others, par-tic-u-larly when a story involves betrayal or impropriety. Gossip in ancient Mesopotamia didn’t just circulate privately, it was often formalized in public records, scratched into clay for all eternity.

    So why do we gossip? The word itself descended from godsibb (“God sibling”), an Old English term for women who would support a friend or relative through childbirth. The term lost its positive connotations over the centuries, as exemplified by a 16th-century Scottish torture instrument called a “gossip’s bridle,” a horrifying spiked muzzle that was clamped down on to the tongues of women accused of witchcraft.

    Yet anthropologists believe the innate desire to gossip might not be bad for society; indeed, it has some evolutionary advantages. One study argues that human society would not be sustainable if it weren’t for gossip, as for much of our history it was the only way to spread information over large groups. Another paper says that gossip reinforces and polices cultural norms and keeps members of the tribe in check. The most recent paper on the subject agrees, finding that “dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations.” In other words, gossip is evolution’s way of saying “Don’t be a dick.”

    I hear gossip’s good for our health, too. One 2012 study found that when participants were gossiping about an antisocial person or behavior, their heart rates reduced and the activity “calmed the body.” Another set of experiments shows that sharing rumors activates the ventral striatum – a part of the brain’s reward and motivation system – while another study found that gossipers going through tough situations had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than those better at keeping secrets. So gossiping is quite literally good for body, mind and maybe even soul.

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

  • Why we finally bought a Ring doorbell

    Why we finally bought a Ring doorbell

    Knock, knock. Who’s there? Well, according to the app it was the FedEx man at 10:27, Amazon man at 11:17, UPS at 1:44 and the kindergarten-run mother with double buggy at 3:22. What romance, what mystery in the age of the Ring doorbell? Every coming and going, every missed parcel and key fumble is filmed, timestamped and sent to my husband’s phone along with a notification.

    We resisted Ring for two years. Two years of a broken bell and delivery drivers hammering on the door. Over the summer we caved and now the house is monitored night and day. “Must make it difficult,” I mused to Andy as we reviewed the footage on the first evening, “for anyone to have affairs any more.” Not that I want to, just what would love and literature be if not for the clandestine door-knock in the night? How do you booty-call in peace when your roommates are pinged as the booty arrives? How do you dance the tentative, teenage, doorstep two-step deciding whether to kiss goodnight or not if Mom and Dad are watching on their phones?

    “Is there anybody there?” asks the Traveller in Walter de la Mare’s much-anthologized poem “The Listeners.” And as his horse in the silence champs the grasses of the forest’s ferny floor, the Ring rings through to a mobile phone beside a sun-lounger in Corsica and the distant listener replies: “We’ve just run to the shops. Could you leave the package in the garbage shed?” (Under no circumstances should you tell the lonely Traveller you’re away for a fortnight.) What agony Tess Durbeyfield might have been spared if only Ring or Blink or Nest could have told Angel Clare that she had slipped her letter under his door! And spare a thought for the Highwayman riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door to twinkle his rapier at the innkeeper’s daughter while the innkeeper refreshes his feed. Dithering earlier this year about what to do about our door, I browsed eBay for brass ship bells, school bells and last-orders-please bells. Wouldn’t it be nice for visitors to ding-dong merrily when they came to call? I was even tempted by a sonorous “Marley-was-dead” sort of knocker. I wanted something tactile, antique, traditional. Researching my book about Kettle’s Yard, a house-turned-art gallery in Cambridge, England, I was struck by the number of people who remembered with perfect clearness, sometimes at a distance of 60 years, the experience of first ringing the bell – via a weathered cork disk on a knotted rope – to be let in.

    A couple of burglaries on our road – power tools mostly, stolen from renovations – and a smashed window opposite made us anxious. I accept the usefulness of the Ring system as security and deterrent while mourning its inelegance and intrusion. No mobcapped maids summoned by bells, no private detectives in unwatched doorways, no thundering dunning of the bailiffs. Just the ubiquitous, soulless bing-bing-bong, bing-bing-bong ringing up and down the street.

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

  • The joy of made-up languages

    I wasn’t supposed to understand Potato language. It was my parents’ speech device, employed when wishing to discuss certain apparently secret subjects in front of my brother and me. While chewing over some esoteric topic, they would suddenly lapse into Potato language, a.k.a “P-language” or just “P.” Being a young child, the subject matter didn’t interest me – I was more intent on trying to figure out why on a whim they’d switch to speaking a discordant, discombobulated version of our everyday language.

    Unknown to them, from the age of about seven I gradually became bilingual in P and by ten, I was fluent. As I grew older, I realized the point of converting to P was to discuss topics not intended for our ears.

    As neither of our parents ever spoke to us in P, we didn’t speak it to them and as a teenager I discovered, to my surprise, that my brother had never picked it up. Being sensible and slightly older than me, he probably regarded it as a linguistic abomination.

    P-language is constructed by inserting the letter “p” at strategic points in a word – generally before or after each syllable, depending on the word. The word “potato” would be spoken as “puh-po-tuh-pay-tuh-po.” Gibberish perhaps, but occasionally useful gibberish. The word “gibberish” is not, though, merely a description of nonsensical babble. It may refer to a linguistic game in which words are modified by the insertion of specific letters, as in P. Other examples are Pig Latin and Eggy Peggy.

    For more serious and practical usage, a multitude of artificially constructed languages, or “conlangs,” have been created over many years. One of the most widely used is the international auxiliary language Esperanto – a universal language devised in the 19th century by Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist Ludwik Zamenhof. It’s intended to be simple to learn, with phonetic spelling and uncomplicated grammar. Among other conlangs is International Sign Language, offering a means of communicating with those who are deaf. Polari was an argot used within the British gay community before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967. Fictional conlangs abound within literature and film, such as Elvish in The Lord of the Rings and Klingon in Star Trek.

    In my later teenage years, I confessed to my parents my long-standing fluency in their supposed secret lingo and P has since occasionally proved handy. A few weeks ago, my mother and I were in a café when we became aware of a couple at a table a little too close to ours sitting in silence, occasionally glancing at us as we quietly mulled over an old family matter. Noticing the eavesdropping, we spoke in P only to remark on the fact of the attention before returning to chatting again in plain English about a banal subject.

    This incident was a rarity but I am keen to preserve the language within my family. My two great-nieces are aged two and three and their highly receptive brains would probably cotton on to it easily. I’m not sure what their parents would make of their great-aunt chattering in gobbledygook, so I’ll wait a few years. Their parents might adopt the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach – or simply warn the children of an impending visit by the eccentric great-aunt, with her tongue-twisting parlance.

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