Bingo first appeared in English at the close of the 17th century as cant slang for brandy. Thought to evolve from ‘stingo’, coined in reference to the sharp taste of strong alcohol, with the -o ending simulating Italian or Spanish. The better-known exclamatory bingo (rarely without a !) is likely also a derivation, this time from American slang ‘bingo-bango’, describing a short and decisively-concluded exchange of punches and blows. This bingo(!)’s first recorded use, in a Montana newspaper, the Butte X-ray, in 1907, echoes the rather macho association: “A man with a pretty wife may chance to owe another man a large sum of money which he can never pay. A little mutual arrangement between husband and wife,..and bingo! the account is squared.” Classy…

As is the game of the same name. I won’t hear otherwise. It’s a game yes of chance, but speed and concentration are also essential. It has its very own language too for calling numbers. Favourites include ‘Dirty Gertie’ - 30, ‘Clickety Click’ - 66, and of course, 88 is ‘Two Fat Ladies’. Whence plausibly the expression ‘bingo wings’, though it might also come from older women waving their completed cards in a Bingo hall. A horribly derogatory label. As the author, Emma Woolf identified in her book Ministry of Thin, “Think of the terms we use to describe our body parts, that ever-expanding litany of hate: cankles, bingo wings, muffin tops, thunder thighs.”

Back to Kerry Bingo: off on a dolphin-spotting boat trip and a stop at a pub further along the coast. 

P.S. several hours later: trip of dreams- a pod of obliging dolphins followed by a pint and a toastie. Bingo!

But still, there would seem to be a lot - Penguins and puffins, pigeons, partridges and parrots, petrels and plovers. Oh and pelicans…

Pelican comes from Latin via French, with origins in the Ancient Greek word πέλεκυς ‘axe’ or ‘hatchet’, presumably due to the shape of its bill. Pelican first appeared in Old English (c. 11th century) in a bible reference (Psalm 102), the ‘pelican in the wilderness,’ describing a state of isolation and deprivation - far from pelicans’ natural habitat of a waterside community. (It’s worth noting that no one in England would have any idea for centuries to come what an actual pelican was - the first pair arrived in 1664 in St James’ Park as a gift to Charles ll from the Russian ambassador.)

A rather unlikely second biblical association - the pelican with Jesus - comes from a 2nd century myth that a mother pelican would pierce her own breast to feed her starving young. Such connotations of self-sacrifice and charity were later somewhat undermined by the English writer and wit, G.K. Chesterton, who “wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.” 

Pelicans have their unlike place in heraldry too. As A. C. Fox-Davies wrote in The Complete Guide to Heraldry, “The Pelican, with its curious heraldic representation, may almost be considered an instance of the application of the existing name of a bird to an entirely fanciful creation.”

And yet the pelican has not not always been considered such a paragon of virtue. Shakespeare’s King Lear refers to Gonerill and Regan as ‘pelican daughters’, while, also in the 16th century, London’s oldest riverside pub, The Pelican, was infamous for its thieving, smuggling (and worse) clientele. A gallows still stands outside the back of the pub, now renamed as The Prospect of Whitby. The alleyway beside it retains the name, Pelican Stairs. Not to be confused - of course - with the much more recent Pelican crossing, - I learned today - an acronym of sorts of ‘PErsonal LIght CONtrolled’. Distinct from the more logically named zebra crossing. 

Fossils dating it back 30 million years, an actual pelican is a massive water bird measuring as tall as six feet, with a wingspan double that, and its foot and a half-long bill can hold three gallons of water. 

As the poet Dixon Lanier Merritt wrote in 1910, 

“A wonderful bird is a pelican, 

His bill will hold more than his belican. 

He can take in his beak 

Food enough for a week; 

But I'm damned if I see how the helican.”

Rather more entertaining than the tired joke about the similarity between British Gas and pelicans - they can both stick their bills up their arse…

Both words are also of uncertain origin, with mentions of possibly Norse and Old Danish in their etymologies. It’s suggested that bludgeon may be a cant (the language of thieves and petty criminals) word, related to blood. Bludgeon appeared in English as a noun in 1730, with the verb form following a few years later. Used exclusively literally in its early life, its figurative meaning became more predominant in the 20^th century. Eighty years ago, the American author, Henry Miller, wrote with eery prescience in The Air-conditioned Nightmare, “We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.” The only addition I’d make today would be the bludgeoning - sorry, influencing, I meant - of social media…

Bludgeon makes a cracking Scrabble word. Of its eight letters, five are the of most commonly occurring tiles, one of which can often be found already on the board. Plus, it’s just - like the only two regularly-used words that rhyme with it (dudgeon and curmudgeon) - a very pleasing-sounding word. As noted by the inimitable Joyce Meadowcroft to the Chief Inspector in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, “I will never tire of saying bludgeoned. I bet you used to say that a lot in the police, you lucky thing.”

Bargain first appeared in English in the late 14^th century. A verb before it was a noun. While its etymology is, according to the OED, ‘obscure’, bargain may well come from the French bargaigner, originally from Latin barcaniare. The latter is derived from barca ‘barge’ with a sense of going back and forth, the innate feature of a bargaining process. There is also a modern French verb, barguigner - ‘to have difficulty making a decision, to waver’ which rather dovetails with the haggle sense of bargain.

As a noun, a bargain could, from its earlier iterations, be ambiguous. The 17^th century philosopher, John Locke, wrote; “God…would certainly…make it a very ill Bargain to the Transgressor”, while ‘to sell a bargain’ suggested making a fool of someone. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky echoed this more recently: “I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chessboard of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as some part of the bargain.”

So, the ambiguity endures. The bargain-hunter is not universally liked, and the bargain basement, bucket and bin can all be poisoned chalices. Its dichotomy was confirmed in the 1900s by the US journalist, Kim Hubbard, in his definition: “Bargain…anything a customer thinks a store is losing money on”. Around the same time, the author, Earl Wilson, advised, “To sell something, tell a woman it’s a bargain; tell a man it’s deductible.” A gender thing, then? Back in 1776, Adam Smith asserted that bargain was the exclusive preserve of humans: “Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.”

Finally, of course, there’s the small matter of the ‘Faustian bargain’ - less dog bone; more our very soul, but perhaps that’s more than you bargained for…

A new outing (to me, at least) for a word with a particularly obvious meaning - a small horse, although it’s way more specific than that: it’s a small horse of a maximum height of 14.2 hands. Not the distinct species that I assumed for years, before my middle child developed a passion for ponies and all that entailed: an entirely new and impenetrable vocabulary - and I’m a linguist(!), endless kit at vast expense, and the horrors of pony club camp. Blood, sweat and tears. And that was just me. Less the polo pony glamour of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals; rather more Thelwell.

Pony came into English (but first Scottish) in the 17th century, likely from French poulenet ‘a little foal’, although this was recorded in 1444 so there’s an oddly long gap between the two. By the 19^th century, pony had become slang for a racehorse. The loud snorer James Tyrone says in response to his son’s teasing in Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night, “‘If it takes my snoring to make you remember Shakespeare instead of the dope sheet on the ponies, I hope I’ll keep on with it’”.

The size element of pony soon found its way into other fields. A pony remains a small measure of alcohol today. Norman Mailer wrote in Harlot’s Ghost how a CIA operative - not a PONI - “managed to slip a dose of LSD into a pony of Cointreau”. Since the 18^th century, pony has also meant either twenty-five guineas or pounds sterling - presumably inferring a relatively small amount of money - that someone might have to ‘pony up’ (pay), as well as, more recently, a ‘crib’ or summary used as a short cut in academic work.

With less emphasis on size, pony has a place in Cockney rhyming slang, of which my late father-in-law was a huge enthusiast. He’d make his way with his grandchildren through loaf (of bread) - head, apples (and pears) - stairs, often ending in pony (trap) - crap, which they obviously found hilarious.

Sometimes when I sit at my desk, hair pulled back in a ponytail, writing these words I feel like a bit of a one-trick pony, so if you don’t think them totally pony and you’d be willing to offer any endorsement, please do heart below. So long, of course, as you don’t think it’s all too much of a dog and pony show….

An ultimately portable sources of fast-releasing energy, they serve as the ideal go-to snack for small children, exploited by many a desperate mother. In consequence, all three of mine (were) overdosed on them and can barely look at one now. Something of a parenting banana skin…

Banana arrived (ahead of the actual fruit) in English from 1597 from Portuguese and / or Spanish (originally from Wolof - a West African language and also the source of one my earlier and favourite words, palaver). Banana’s first mention was in a translation of a Portuguese account of travels in the Congo. It was thirty years after potato, and a decade before tomato - both from Spanish. All three discovered by early explorers of Africa and the Americas. A one-off for fruit - banana is banana (with the odd variation of final vowel) in pretty much every European language.

Bananas - as evidenced by the expert panel response (ketchup, fritters, daiquiri etc) - can be served in a variety of dishes. It was only in the 20^th century that banana became linguistically more versatile: to be, go, or drive someone bananas suggests excessive, deranged behaviour, sometimes violent and often with bad consequences. Perhaps the precursor (or even outcome) of slipping on a banana skin - or peel - a staple of American cartoons: Tom and Jerry, Top Cat and, of course, The Banana Splits…

(Interestingly, the comedy trope is based on a reality. There was an outbreak of banana skin-related injuries in the late 19^th century in New York when bananas started to be widely imported, and sold by street vendors. Buyers threw their skins on the ground and newspaper reports attest to consequent broken bones and lawsuits. Utterly bananas, I’d say…)

Another media-related idiom, top banana was a term used, originally in comedy, to identify a lead actor. Other cast members were 2^nd, 3^rd etc. banana. Over time, top banana has come to describe anything great.

Bananas have a darker side though - and not just when overripe. Banana republics - originally unstable, banana-exporting countries of Central America - and banana boats are often racist terms used disparagingly to suggest backwardness and corruption.

Bananas had their moment during Covid with the ubiquitous baking of banana bread, but the fruit still (banana)splits opinion. The writer Anne Lamott claimed, “Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread” while the deadpan Andy Murray was less complimentary, dismissing the banana as a “pathetic fruit”. Perhaps the best observation comes allegedly from pop star, Harry Styles: “Never make eye contact while eating a banana”.

I leave you with the inimitable Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”. If you’ve enjoyed this, please go bananas, and heart this below. That’d be top banana!

“I assume you’ve done sycophant,” she said.

“Ooh no, but I should, it’s a great word.”

“You know where it comes from, then?”

I shook my head.

Reader, settle in. It’s a good one and, improbably, involves figs.

Sycophant came into English via French from Latin, but originally it was a Greek word, or rather two words: σῦκον ‘fig’ + ϕαν- ‘to show’, and was a term applied to informers who ‘grassed’ on those illegally exporting figs in Ancient Greece. Its meaning broadened, as per Thirlwall in his 1838 History of Greece, to describe “a class of men who were universally odious, the informers, or sycophants as they were called at Athens, who had perverted the laws.”

The fig might seem a random form of contraband but (fig)roll with me - it has a disproportionately significant place across culture. A key role in Genesis, specifically the fig leaf, later used figuratively to infer a thinly-veiled disguise, while the fruit itself has long had coarse sexual connotations in several languages. To ‘fig someone’ (or give someone the fig) was a contemptuous gesture in the 1600s:

“When Pistol lies, do this, and fig me, like the bragging Spaniard.” (Shakespeare; Henry IV).

In the same era, figs were regularly used to poison religious elites, leading to the expression to ‘fig away’, used by Bishop Barlow in 1609: “Cardinals Allen and Tollet; yea Pope Sixtus Quintus himselfe, all figg’d away in a trice.”

Fig can also, of course, imply something small and irrelevant, as in ‘not giving a fig’.

Clearly, though, in Ancient Greece the fig was big. Back to those who thought so…

Appearing in English for the first time in the mid 16^th century, sycophant almost immediately extended beyond its sense of the deceitful and treacherous to denote someone servile and flattering. As personified most clearly by Dickens’ Uriah Heap, his name often a synonym for sycophant, although other terms abound - bootlicker, brown-nose, toady, lickspittle. A label often given to courtiers, early-career politicians and those low on the corporate ladder, there is little to recommend a sycophant. As the American novelist Kathleen Winsor archly observed in one of her books: “The king appeared with his dogs and sycophants behind him.”

Reviled by the majority but cherished by those to whom they pander, the latter might heed the cautionary tale of the sycophant in The Lord of the Rings. His toxic flattery and manipulation undid the king. The clue was there in his name - Grima Wormtongue. Go FIGure - nothing subtle about a sycophant…

For much of its life, waif has rarely appeared without its partner, stray. Somewhat akin to flotsam and jetsam. The more so, because both pairs originally referred to objects with no apparent owner in the sea. Flotsam describes objects that have floated to the surface from a sunk vessel, while jetsam was deliberately thrown from said vessel. Waif and stray are less specific in their provenance and also mutually indiscernible, with the two sometimes being merged in early usage as ‘straif’.

First used in English in the 14^th century, from French waif, gweif, waif’s meaning evolved over time, often signifying an abandoned or simply underfed child, usually a girl. Despite shared connotations of thinness and fragility, waif is disappointingly unrelated to wafer, also from French - wafre, gaufre, Indeed, John Grange could well have been referring to a waif in his 1577 work, The Golden Aphroditis, writing, “Yea, yea, she treades so nice, she would not wafers breake.”

By the late 19^th century - the height of its usage - waif was regularly a more figurative term for a neglected thing or idea. In Dombey and Son, Dickens wrote: “I had no scruples of conscience in suffering all the waifs and strays of that conversation to float to me as freely as they would.”

Waif not only featured in texts but also in titles - the French novelist Georges Sand’s François le Waif, Jules Verne’s The waif of the ‘Cynthia’, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Waif Women, but it was ‘The Waif’, a character in cult series Game of Thrones, who firmly established the word in popular culture. Well, she and Kate Moss, who articulated her embrace of waif in the words, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

In case you were wondering, Mike’s team were the eventual winners. His waif opponents perhaps lacked the necessary muscle…

^[1] I should, though I’m loathe to, mention that there are also the Xxx Wanderers and the Xxx Ramblers, so it’s not just a fattist comment …

Already over-heated, my temperature shoots higher still, and I feel prickly all over. Because it’s my bag I know where the thing they’re after will be- in which internal pocket, or just at which end of the bag. And if anyone is going to rummage, it should be me. And still they rummage. Hence today’s word. 

Rummage has two possible (and perhaps merged) origins. The first from French, arrumage ‘arranging or rearranging cargo in a ship’. It first appeared in the early 16th century in the Collections of Ordinances of the Royal Household: ”Cellaridge, Cranage, Sponage, Romage, and Carridge of Wine, £100 0s. 0d.” The second is rummish, originally Scottish, meaning to poke around and stir things up. 

Rummage today combines the two in its sense of a thorough but unsystematic search. In the US, they hold ‘rummage sales’. (What we Brits would call a jumble sale.) The rummage sale has further become a metaphor for today’s dating scene, the romance novelist Mary Jo Putney writing of New York City: “from a dating point of view it’s like a really large rummage sale - lots of strange items but darned little that you’d want to take home”.

A pleasing coincidence of euphemism given that, for centuries, rummage has had sexual connotations.  In The Art of Wheedling (1675), the aptly named Richard Head wrote of a certain type, “He never is at quiet till he hath made a prize of some or other, whom he tows off to a tavern and there rummages the Hold at pleasure”.

I should perhaps feel less aggrieved. In rummaging terms, I’m actually getting off very lightly….

There are certain adjective-noun combinations that just trip off the tongue. Selective and memory (or amnesia), abject and failure, and, especially, blatant and lie. Oh, or blatant and disregard too, but let’s disregard that for now…

Blatant was invented, or - as wordsmiths prefer- coined, at the end of the 16th century by Edmund Spenser in his poem, The Faerie Queen. He used it to describe the “blatant beast’, offspring of Cerberus and Chimaera, a 1000-tongued monster, who embodied slander. A lying gossip, and a loud and vocal one at that. The lexicographer Blount in his 1656 innovative dictionary, Glossographia, further defined it, “Blatant - babbling, twatling.”

It’s unclear whence Spenser came up with blatant, the ‘a’ of which would have been pronounced as in cat - more blattant, really. Possibly - according to the OED - linked to bleating. More likely is the Latin blatire, ‘to babble’, disappointingly (for me) unrelated etymologically to blather. A word whose first appearance in English dates to the same era, but instead derives from Norse blaðra.

Over time, blatant’s sense has switched from ear to eye, coming to signify obtrusive or conspicuous, and then - more figuratively - overt or obvious.

Its more recent partnering with lies brings it pleasingly full circle to Spenser’s original meaning, and - worthy of note - blatant’s usage has increased from the 1950s to today by more than 100%. Does that also mean we are lying more, I wonder? 

P.S. In a blatant bit of self- promotion I wanted to let you know that I have compiled some of my most popular words into a little book which will be available in the coming weeks….

Margo aside, no one wants be labelled posh. And it’s certainly not (intended to be) a compliment. For the most part, posh is one of those adjectives applied to others (usually incorrectly - see: Posh Spice), and definitely NOT something you’d say about yourself.

The popular myth is that posh originated as an acronym of Port Out; Starboard Home, the ideal cabin location for a cooler, more comfortable voyage on ships travelling between Britain and India. P.O.S.H. was allegedly printed on the more privileged passengers’ tickets, but no such tickets have ever been produced.

Instead, the adjective posh seems more likely to derive from two discrete meanings of its noun form. From Romani påš ‘penny’, it meant (having) money. Court records from the Old Bailey in 1830 said of an indicted man, “He had not got the posh (which means money) yet.” while later W. Newton’s Secrets of Tramp Life Revealed, defined it thus: “Posh..money of all kind”. In the late 19^th century, a posh could also refer to a dandy or fop. A merging of the two may well have led to our current definition. A final contender comes from a 1903 collection of short stories by P.G. Wodehouse, in which a waistcoat is described as “quite the most push thing of the sort in Cambridge.” According to the OED, this might reflect a supposedly refined - posh, even - way of saying posh. (Does make the phrase ‘too posh to push’ potentially confusing…)

Interestingly, just as there was no posh ticket, there really is no such thing as being posh. As was written in Blackwoods’ Magazine in 1915, “Posh may be defined, very roughly, as a useless striving after gentlemanly culture.” The more posh you try to be, the less posh you actually are…

No coincidence perhaps that Saint Jude, one of Jesus’ apostles (Not Judas Iscariot, obvs), was the patron saint of lost causes and desperate situations…. Nothing like a bit of nominative determinism, and a preferable inspiration to Thomas Hardy’s Jude (the Obscure) who, while ambitious and idealistic, was ultimately doomed.

Other famous examples include Jude Law, Bridget Jones’ best friend and the nickname of the late great Judith Chalmers who broadcast from Mexico City in the ‘80s, quite possibly around the time of the ‘hand of God’. A moment decisively exorcised early yesterday morning by the (head and) foot of England’s great new (apostle of) hope. And so on to Saturday where England meet Norway, whose talisman Erling’s name means ‘heir of a nobleman’. The saint versus the Viking chieftain. Football - never knowingly understated. As the song says,

“Hey, Jude, begin
You’re waiting for someone to perform with
And don’t you know that it’s just you,
Hey, Jude, you’ll do”

More than do, really….

Palace came into English in the 1300s from French palais, originally from Latin Palatium ‘Palatine’, the name of one of the seven hills of Rome, home to imperial leaders millennia ago. Palace is one of the 5000 most common words in English, and there are a lot of them. A veritable ABC - Alexandra, Buckingham, Crystal etc. just for starters. Clearly distinguished from a castle - less fortification; more ostentation. Think Versailles, Camden, Caesar’s. And indeed, palace’s meaning has broadened (and democratized) coming to suggest grandiosity of size, style and sheer luxe. Through history there have even been coffee palaces, pizza palaces, and - of course - gin palaces.

Interestingly, Andrew Mountbatten once volunteered of his own mother: “The Queen’s intelligence network is a hell of a lot better than anyone’s in this palace. Bar none. She knows everything. I don’t know how she does it. And she sees everything.” Sounds almost like a Sherlockian mind or memory palace. A) I hope she didn’t (know or see everything), and B) she did herself say, “Recollections may vary.”

However juicy palace intrigue sounds, even the Palace must be tiring of it. As Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, once observed, “The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.”

I’m struck that there seems to be a disproportionate number of words suggesting unpleasantness and disorder that begin with the letter ‘m’. There’s in part an obvious reason for this - mal, meaning bad or evil, originally from Latin, features in a fair few - malice, malaise, malpractice - but there are plenty of others too. Just a few examples - miasma (from Greek) - a foul-smelling gas, murk (from German)  - darkness or gloom, morass - muddy, swampy ground, and maelstrom - a dangerous whirlpool, both from Dutch. All are (much more often) used figuratively.

Maelstrom, meaning a state of turbulence or a swirling mass, is a compound of mael - to grind and strom - stream. It was originally an actual place, a whirlpool off the west coast of Norway, first documented in a 1595 atlas, in an era of Dutch maritime supremacy. The Doldrums (and specifically the Equatorial variety), conversely, is a place whose name derives from the word for a condition of low spirits or inactivity. In the Doldrums there is - for meteorological reasons - an absence of wind, stranding sailors indefinitely.

Ironically, perhaps, given its real-world origins, there is something intangible about maelstrom in its modern usage. Used to qualify political or emotional turmoil, it smacks of hyperbole, and is a favourite of headline writers, crossword setters, and the creator of quite some maelstrom himself, Jeremy Clarkson, who once questioned: "Why is the forecast so bland? Why instead of 'stormy' don't they just say the sea's 'a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness'?"

Master of the mysterious and macabre, Edgar Allen Poe wrote the short story, A descent into the Maelstrom, describing the whirlpool thus: “Here the vast bed of waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion-heaving, boiling, hissing-gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes”. Quite the 3-D image. And, I’d say, a pleasingly 3-D word.

Moist came into English in the 14^th century from French moiste, denoting a level of wetness - less wet than wet, but more damp than damp. Spanning various domains - seasons, weather, anatomically (especially eyes) - it was also later used figuratively by the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare. Moist’s negative connotations evolved more recently: wet or drip as an insult appeared in late 19^th century schoolboy slang, with damp and moist only added in the early 2000s. About the same time that moist became such a pariah word for so many - though not all. While a moist cake is every baker’s ambition, most would resist describing it as such. Not so the Great British Bake Off judge, Paul Hollywood, who resolved to use moist in every episode despite - or, quite possibly, because of - the reaction of contestants.

A favourite too of the wonderful poet, Mary Oliver, who wrote: “And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?””

Please do - let me know your most hated (or loved) word(s) and why….

While feckless is a relatively common word, its opposite feckful is rarely said or written. There are quite a number of such so-called lost positives. You don’t hear of reckful, gormful or ruthful, nor do you really encounter couth or gruntled, P.G. Wodehouse aside.

From Irish there’s also a somewhat different feck, an alternative to f*ck, both a verb and an expletive. Extrapolating, not giving a feck could indeed make you feckless. If you’ve enjoyed this, please do heart it below since I am very much someone who does give a feck - feckful, even…

Boutique comes - duhh - from French but originally it’s from the Greek apotheke - apo meaning ‘from’ and theke ‘the place where things are stored’ (whence also apothecary). Linguistically, p and b sounds are often interchangeable, as are t and d hence Italian’s bottega and Spanish bodega, the name for the 24-hour convenience store found on every street in New York - less boutique, more corner shop really.

Boutique was first used in English in the late 18^th century, referring to small shops in cities of the empire, particularly in India. By the 1960s it came to describe high-end fashion outlets, as per Mary Quant’s articulated aspiration: “It was agreed that if we could find the right premises for a boutique... It was to be a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories… sweaters, scarves, shifts, hats, jewellery, and peculiar odds and ends.”

In the past decades, boutique has mostly shifted from noun to adjective, elevating hotels, law firms, advertising agencies and even investment banks. A boutique business - just by virtue of its boutiqueness - offers individualized service, personalized care, and detailed attention. It’s undeniably high-end. Boujie, even?

And yet there’s something nebulous about boutique. A Washington Times article hints at its self-styling: “Cabernet and chardonnay prices are below many of the so called boutique wineries.” Meanwhile, pretty much every finance bro in the Square Mile currently claims to have left the grey corporate world behind: “I’ve moved to a new place, mate, it’s actually more of a boutique fund”. Use of the word itself has, unsurprisingly, increased dramatically. Boutique seems to be everywhere. Ironic, really…

Wow didn’t start off as the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll or shoulder shrug. It is an unexpectedly old word. Its first mention in English came in the 1500s in a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. “Out on thir wanderand spiritis, wow! thow cryis.” Wow is thought to come from vow, an abbreviation of the expression, ‘I vow’, used to reinforce a statement.

As an exclamation over time, it has ranged from despair to delight with surprise, wonder and admiration all thrown in. The late 19^th century novel, Artie, a Chicago classic, features the exchange:

“‘The girls—wow!’

‘Beauties, eh?’

‘Lollypaloozers!’”

Incidentally, a lollypaloozer (what a word!) is essentially the incarnation of wow.

By 1920, wow was both a verb and a noun, referring initially to stage and screen performances before extending to other domains. In Small Bachelor, P.G. Wodehouse wrote, “‘A friend of mine tipped me off that this company was a wow’. ‘A what?’ ‘A winner. He said it was going to be big and advised me to come in on the ground floor.’”

Wow has only gained traction in the modern era. Wow Comics featuring Mary Marvel, a member of the Shazam (no less!) family, and works including WOW! by the artist, Roy Lichtenstein (also the title of his 2019 retrospective at Tate Modern) enshrined it in pop culture. It is the catchphrase of the actor, (forgive me - W)owen Wilson, who has uttered ‘Wow!’ on screen more than 100 times over his career.

Wow is global: French, Russian, Chinese and Japanese among hundreds of languages share (very slight variations on) the word. In part, possibly, because ‘w’ is one of the easiest sounds to produce. To say wow, all you have to do is purse, then unpurse and then, once again, purse your lips.

I’m leaving the final word to an author with undeniable wow factor, Hunter S. Thompson: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

It is, however, far from an American novelty. Bunch first appeared in English in the 14^th century, of uncertain origin - perhaps a mispronunciation of bulch or bulge - originally denoting a protuberance on the body, most commonly a hunch or hump back. Within a couple hundred years it came to refer more broadly to a collection of objects and, later, people: Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 2 of “Bunches of keyes at their girdles”, while the diarist Samuel Johnson was quoted as having said, “I am glad the Ministry is removed. Such a bunch of imbecility never disgraced a country.”

Nevertheless, bunch is enshrined in American vocabulary and culture - The Brady Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, and - of course - 90s hiphop band, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. There can be something inherently dismissive about the word. As the author, Tom Perrotta wrote, “When things don’t go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.” Or, as my mother often says, when asked what she is doing that day: “Oh, a bunch of stuff…”

I wasn’t sure bunch was going to work; I also wonder whether I’m writing too many words and they’re starting to bunch up. But I’ve decided instead to go with the actor and screen writer Steve Martin’s assessment: “I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.”

Peer comes from French per which had both the sense of an ennobled individual and an equal. Both meanings came into English from 1300 onwards. In The Monk’s Tale, Chaucer wrote: ‘O..Sampsoun..Had thow nat toold to wommen thy secree, In al this world ne hadde been thy peere.’ Before the mid 20^th century, peer was a rather niche word, but with the advent of peer groups and peer pressure its use has increased by 500%, and it is now of the 5000 most common words in English, alongside cool and rough.

The other peer - squinting in the dark, looking furtively where you shouldn’t or staring intrusively - is of uncertain origin, perhaps a blend of leer and peek (or peep). Beloved of authors across the centuries, particularly Hardy and Dickens, the latter’s paranoid character Ralph Nickleby demands of his employee, the excellently named Newman Noggs: “How dare you pry, and peer, and stare at me, sirrah?” The American author, E. B. White, meanwhile, suggests the inherent menace in peer: “When I was a child, people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas and by and large what they see makes them unutterably sad.”

There’s certainly something of the cautionary tale about peer. No more so than in Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt. It’s the eponymous tale of a charming but indolent and deceitful man, always showing off, and ducking responsibility and consequences. Sounding familiar?