Peter Rhodes on a TV tribute, hunting antiques and a word to send us rushing for a dictionary
Tributes of our time. “She is eloquent . . . to a certain extent, she’s a throwback.
"She’s like a vintage car in an age when everyone’s turning electric.” Publicist Mark Bukowki, describing Clare Balding.
Looking for a new (by which I mean, old) desk in an antiques shop, I was struck by how few desks they had and what a huge selection of unsold dining tables. A friend in the business says it's all about social change.
More people are working from home and are snapping up desks, while demand for dining tables has plummeted because families no longer eat together. A nation of diners has become a land of WFH sofa-grazers.
In a speech that sends us all scurrying for our dictionaries, Keir Starmer declares: “Oracy is a skill that can and must be taught.” Oracy? It is the ability to speak well and express yourself and it's at the heart of the Labour leader's pledge to reform education. It's a programme everyone should support.
However, oracy, like kindness and table manners, is surely best taught in the home. In a perfect world, pre-schoolers would chatter fluently with parents who listen, pay attention and help the kid develop his or her language skills. That's not so easy in a society where grown-ups are face-down in a smartphone 24/7 and the kids are plonked in front of the telly and ignored.
And how long, I wonder, before oracy is denounced as elitist and class-ridden and the education “experts” tell us that alternative languages, including the impenetrable inner-city patois adopted by so many teenagers, is “equally valid,” like, yer know wot I mean, innit?
While researching “oracy", I checked out the only joke ever to have made it into Chambers Dictionary. It is “eclair: noun, a cake long in shape but short in duration”. It was dropped from one edition some years ago but Chambers' fans objected and it was reinstated.
The most obscure word in Chambers, as suggested by a lexicographer I once interviewed, is “taghairm”, a form of ancient Scottish divination “sought by lying in a bullock's hide behind a waterfall”. One for the pub quiz.