Shwopping is the new campaign fronted by Joanna Lumley to get people to buy more clothes at M&S and also feel good while they’re about it since any old clothes they bring in will be accepted for recycling, to the benefit of charity. Apparently the store’s ambition is to take in as much as they sell every year, around 350 million items. It sounds like a good idea, or at least not a bad one, although it’s been pointed out that it might be better to encourage people to hang on to their clothes for longer or simply to swop them with one another rather than go out shwopping. It’s an ugly word, this portmanteau blend of ‘swopping’ and ‘shopping’. The description was coined by Lewis Carroll in Alice through the Looking-Glass, and named after a small case (“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’. You see it’s like a portmanteau  -  there are two meanings packed up into one word.”). Some portmanteau terms work while others look like laboratory hybrids. ‘Motel’ is fine but ‘botel’ is clunky. ‘Franglais’, ‘smog’ and ‘stagflation’ are just right as is ‘chugger’ (charity+mugger) to describe the tabarded figures who wait to twist your arm on the High Street. ‘Staycation’ does a good job though it comes across as a bit forced, but ‘frenemy’ and ‘infotainment’ have the feel of terms created by committee. As ‘shwopping’ was, most likely. One of the problems is that it sounds like a drunken slur: “Jusht gonna to do some shwopping.”

It’s reassuring to know that London will be protected during the Olympics by a ring of SAM missiles on top of housing blocks, Lynx helicopters on a big ship on the Thames and jet fighters at RAF Northolt in west London, apparently the first time fighters have been stationed at the base since the Spitfires of World War Two. The most important priority for the RAF, according to the man in charge, is “protecting the homeland [...] that is as true as it was in 1940 as it is today in 2012.”  I don’t think he would have talked about the ‘homeland’ if he’d been speaking in 1940. The word may not have the entirely negative resonance of ‘fatherland’ or the Soviet overtones of ‘motherland’, but it still carries faint echoes of tribalism and a ‘blood and soil’ ideology, of the Nazi era, in short. There was some unease when, after 9/11, the US government set up the Department of Homeland Security. Unease not only at the new powers the authorities were claiming but at the name itself. ‘Homeland’ doesn’t sound American. It doesn’t sound English either. If you’re going to defend something as close to home as home, then it should at least be described in familiar language. ‘Homeland’ has the feel of a translated word. And, in fact, there is the German Heimat, which comes quite close in meaning to ‘homeland’ but in a more benign way. Heimat was the title of a long-running German TV series which started in the middle of the 1980s. Coincidentally, Homeland is the title of the US import just finishing its first season on Channel 4. The title is nicely ambiguous because we don’t yet know what ‘home’ really means to the central character. But it’s a good title also because the word is not quite English (or American) and so reinforces the slighty disorienting attitude behind the thriller.

Omnishambles got a lot of coverage last week as the expression stretched beyond the realm of parliamentary geeks. The Labour leader threw the insult at the Prime Minister but it was Armando Iannucci who first put ‘omnishambles’ into the mouth of spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in the BBC’s The Thick of It. This neat portmanteau word, in which the letters seem so compressed that they’re falling over each, links the Latin omni-  and the Old English shamble. More than a thousand years ago, and spelled differently, a shamble was a table for displaying goods or counting money. By the 14th century, the ‘schamil’ or ‘shamell’ was reserved for the sale of meat only. It was the butcher’s stall. By extension and in the plural form, ‘shambles’ soon became the place where animals were slaughtered for meat as well as applicable to any bloody, murderous site. In the 20th century the word loses its slaughterous overtones, and turns into a synonym for confusion, a mess, a cock-up. The spun-off adjective shambolic isn’t recorded before the 1970s. Omnishambles too might end up in the dictionaries; it’s already in the parliamentary record, Hansard. As if to show the divergent paths the same word may take through linguistic history, its use to describe someone’s gait  -  shamble, shambling  -  refers back to the earliest sense and derives from the widely spaced legs holding up a trestle table.

A new book by journalist Ben Macintyre is the latest in his series describing the counter-intelligence plots engineered by British intelligence to fool the Nazis into thinking that the Allies were doing one thing while, all the time, they were doing the opposite. Specifically, Double Cross deals with the successful hoodwinking of the Germans into the belief that the D-Day landings would be at the Pas de Calais rather than on the Normandy beaches. This involved the use of double agents under the direction of the Twenty Committee. As Macintyre says, this was the first and only government body named with a Roman numerical pun. Twenty=XX=double cross, which is exactly what the agents were doing to the Nazis who trusted them. No letter in the alphabet is more evocative, ambiguous and versatile than X. Among much else, the letter stands for the unknown. Mr X may be the tantalisingly unnamed party to some dispute or court case. X marks the spot on a map but gives no clue to what lies beneath. Your X on the ballot paper is an unmistakable sign but one whose exact location ought to be nobody’s business but yours. As well as an assertion of a democratic right, the X can also be the mark of what’s wrong (the counterpart of the tick). In an expression such as the X-generation, it signifies apathy, tepid rebellion. For years, the X-rating for films was a combination of warning and come-on. Often the X was proclaimed in bigger, bolder type than the title or the stars and even multiplied (XX, XXX!) to show that this wasn’t just adult material but ADULT. Why is this letter used for the taboo? Because it’s mysterious? Because it operates as a bar in a way that the gate-like H or A would not (one could climb under or round those)? And then there are the x’s for kisses. Usually lower-case and subject to the same inflationary effect as the taboo X, their origin is also mysterious. One suggestion is that the letter represents crossed lips.

You either get the Titanic or you don’t. I have to say I don’t. For many it is the ultimate tale of hubristic glamour, a combination of tragedy and pathos, heroism and frailty. But for a minority it’s the over-exposed story of a big boat that sank. Hundreds of boats have gone down with, proportionately, a greater loss of life while the worst maritime disaster in history  -  the Soviet torpedoing of the German cruise vessel Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945 which resulted in up 7,000 deaths  -  is almost unknown. It’s the Titanic which sparks obsession, and gives the English language a short-hand way of referring to human arrogance or the limits of technology or the Edwardian sunset glow which preceded World War One or tedious nostalgia for a hierarchy running from First to steerage, and so on … The moment you hear a character like the factory-owner in J.B.Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls talking about the boat being ‘unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable’,  you know he’s being shown up as a complacent idiot. Not only is the boat and its fate a flexible metaphor, the details of its demise come in handy for expressions such as ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the … ’ or ‘the band played on’. The Titanic is like one of those animals whose every part can be consumed or put to use in some way. The most recent term is the portmanteau word, Titanorak, which is at least amusing even if it suggests that the unfathomable interest in this boat is good for another century or two.

Yesterday’s advice from a member of the Cabinet to prepare for a possible petrol shortage by storing the stuff in jerrycans met with well-deserved ridicule and pushed a homely old word into the headlines. The jerrycan (or jerrican) first appeared during World War Two and, yes, it was a German innovation. According to a Times article from 1944, the Germans had come up with a ‘very efficient’ 5-gallon petrol can, some samples of which were captured by the Eighth Army and sent to England to be copied. This use of ‘Jerry’ as a faintly pejorative expression for a German person or thing dates from Word War One and has nothing to do with the other standard application of ‘jerry-’ in ‘jerry-built’. The derivation of this one is obscure. It might refer to the tumbling walls of Jericho, even if their collapse was more to do with divine intervention than poor construction work. An alternative suggestion is that Jerry was the name of a Victorian-era builder in Liverpool renowned for his shoddy work. In turn, this ‘jerry’ has nothing to with ‘jerrymandering’ (more correctly, ‘gerrymandering’), the fiddling of constituency/voting boundaries to favour a particular political party. There was a real Gerry Mander, a signatory to the US Declaration of Independence and governor of Massachusetts in the early 19th century. For two centuries Gerry’s name has been linked to this piece of political sharp practice  -  a bit unfairly, because he was apparently not very happy with the boundary bill to which he attached his monicker. And these jerries have nothing at all to do with an older sense of ‘jerry’ to signify a chamberpot, and which is probably an abbreviation of ‘jeroboam’, a large bottle or goblet which in turn derives from the Old Testament figure of Jeroboam.

After ‘chuffed’ (last week’s entry), now ‘chaff’. Literally, this is the worthless part of corn or other grain, the husks which are separated in threshing. It’s also a rather dated term applied to mild ridicule, possibly because of some shared sense of lightness. The same word was used by the US Air Force during World War Two for the strips of metal foil released during bombing raids as a distracting counter-measure against enemy radar. The presence of the incoming aircraft was hidden or blurred by the overwhelming effect of the chaff. Used on a large scale for the first time during a series of raids on Hamburg in the summer of 1943, chaff resulted in a drop of about three-quarters in the rate of loss for the bombers. This was a very cost-effective piece of deception. A few ounces of the metallic strips were said to provide a radar reflection equivalent to that of three heavy bombers. It’s easy to see why the USAF came up with ‘chaff’ for these clusters of tiny, floating objects. Less obvious is the British equivalent for the same thing: Window. Perhaps this code-name, the creation of a radar scientist, was intended ironically since the use of ‘Window’ made it almost impossible for the enemy to ‘see’ where you were. Or perhaps it refers indirectly to the reflective quality of a real window. There is no connection with later quasi-military expressions such as ‘window of opportunity’ or ‘window of vulnerability’. The Germans developed their own version of chaff/Window which they called Düppel, possibly after a district of Berlin.

Perhaps Barack Obama was trying to dispel those old whispers about being anti-British or at any rate not as pro-British as US Presidents are supposed to be. Or perhaps he wanted to make David Cameron feel at home during the Prime Minister’s visit across the pond. Whatever the reason, it was a neat move to introduce a few examples of (British) English slang into his welcoming remarks to Dave and Sam in front of the White House. He was ‘chuffed to bits’ at the Camerons’ presence, he was looking forward to a ‘great natter’ while being committed to keeping the special relationship ‘absolutely top-notch’. Obama also joked about not needing to wait for a translator. What strikes the (British) English ear, though, is the dated quality of the President’s choice of words, as if they had actually been filtered through a translator or lifted from one of those black-and-white 1950s films about quiet heroics in WW2. ‘Absolutely top-notch’ could come out of The Dam Busters, while ‘natter’ was uncomplimentary service slang  -  a natter party being a conference that led nowhere. ‘Natter’, of course, is still in use though I’m not sure it’s often preceded by ‘great’ (you have ‘a good natter’ or, more likely, ‘a good old natter’). ‘Chuffed’ is an oddity. Another example of military slang, it usually means ‘pleased’ but can also mean ‘annoyed’ or ‘disgruntled’. At least Obama’s speech writers qualified it in the right way with ‘ … to bits’. ‘Dead chuffed’ would have been a step too far, as would other extensions like ‘chuffed to buggery’.

The death this week of Norman St John Stevas made for some nice obituaries in what are still called the broadsheets. The old parliamentarian, wit, Royal Family favourite and bon vivant was regularly termed ‘flamboyant’ in their accounts of his life. This wasn’t only because of his exquisite dress sense or his taste in curtains, but because Stevas was, it is safe to assume, gay. In the obituarists’ prose, ‘flamboyant’ is a standard pointer to this, as is the description ‘confirmed bachelor’ or the words, appearing at the very end like a judge’s sentence, ‘He never married.’ Other euphemistic obituary terms are ‘convivial’ for a man whose appetite for drink bordered on alcoholism, with ‘vivacious’ as the female equivalent, and ‘tireless raconteur’ to signify a world-class bore. The old injunction not to speak ill of the dead  -  or at least not for a few months  -  is generally observed, although if the dead didn’t bother to hide their vices, they might find them advertised as in the Daily Telegraph sub-heading on William Donaldson ‘described by Kenneth Tynan as “an old Wykehamist who ended up as a moderately successful Chelsea pimp”, which was true, though he was also a failed theatrical impresario, a crack-smoking serial adulterer and a writer of autobiographical novels … ’ With those who are still living, greater care is needed. Private Eye has evolved coded language such as ‘tired and emotional’ to mean ‘drunk’, while police reporting is studded with such roundabout phrases as ‘would like to talk to’ (suspect), ‘helping with enquiries’ (very suspect) and ‘alleged’ (guilty, probably).

The czars (or tsars) didn’t quite disappear with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Indeed, in recent years they have multiplied so many times over that you could fill whole Winter Palaces with them. In Russia, the tsar was the supreme ruler, unique by definition, and so his family attachments  -  like tsarevich or tsarina  -  could be known only by variants or diminutives of the great original. In the 1930s the word began appearing in the US to signify a person appointed by the government to oversee some area of policy. There’s nothing Russian or regal about this kind of czar but, rather, it’s the autocratic, bossy overtones of the title which are being evoked. The government-appointed ‘czar’ is brought in to handle tricky or contentious areas, ones where a bit of no-nonsense authority is required. Is there anything a czar can’t deal with? It seems not since, to pick an almost random sample from the English-speaking world, there are or have been czars for drugs, happiness, ethics, cancer, the High Street, crime, poverty, fitness, jobs, victims, borders, food, enterprise, adoption, transport, and so on and on. Some czars may even feel short-changed because they have quite narrow specialisms such as heart disease or a (BP oil) spill or executive pay. The appeal of the word lies in its vaguely exotic sound together with the suggestion of imperious (rather than imperial) powers which it is meant to bestow on the holder. But chucking a czar at a problem is not the same as solving it.