Susie Dent Quotes

quiddling’ (attending to the trivial tasks in life as a way of avoiding the important ones).

Language is a democratic enterprise.

And there is always the argument-closing ‘Villain, I have done thy mother’, a retort from Titus Andronicus of such eviscerating wit that we still honour it today with jokes beginning with ‘your mum’.

BITCH THE POT Tea and gossip go together. At least, that’s the stereotypical view of a tea gathering: a group of women gathered around the teapot exchanging tittle-tattle. As popularity of the beverage imported from China (‘tea’ comes from the Mandarin Chinese cha) increased, it became particularly associated with women, and above all with their tendency to gossip. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue lists various slang terms for tea, including ‘prattle-broth’, ‘cat-lap’ (‘cat’ being a contemporary slang for a gossipy old woman), and ‘scandal broth’. To pour tea, meanwhile, was not just to ‘play mother’, as one enduring English expression has it, but also to ‘bitch the pot’ – to drink tea was to simply ‘bitch’. At this time a bitch was a lewd or sensual woman as well as a potentially malicious one, and in another nineteenth-century dictionary the phraseology is even more unguarded, linking tea with loose morals as much as loquaciousness: ‘How the blowens [whores] lush the slop. How the wenches drink tea!’ The language of tea had become another vehicle for sexism, and a misogynistic world view in which the air women exchanged was as hot as the beverage they sipped. ‘Bitch party’ and ‘tabby party’ (again the image of cattiness) were the terms of choice for such gossipy gatherings. Men, it seems, were made of stronger stuff, and drank it too. Furthermore, any self-respecting man would ensure his wife and daughters stayed away from tea. The pamphleteer and political writer William Cobbett declared in 1822: The gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. The girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her. In the twenty-first century, to ‘spill the T’ has become a firm part of drag culture slang for gossiping. T here may stand for either ‘truth’ or the drink, but either way ‘weak tea’ has come to mean a story that doesn’t quite hold up – and it’s often one told by women. Perhaps it’s time for bitches to make a fresh pot.

Tabby Originally the name of a silk material with a ‘watered’ surface, giving an effect of wavy lines. This was later applied to a brownish cat with dark stripes, because its markings resemble this material. The ultimate source of the name is in Arabic al-’attabiya, literally ‘quarter of (Prince) ‘Attab’, this being the district of Baghdad where the fabric was first made.

Exactly. But we can never know what's really going on in another person's head. We're all so obsessed with our own problems and with how people see us that we create simple silhouettes for everyone else.

You think it's a man?" "Oh, of course it's a bloody man, Alex.

She didn't like flat-out drunkenness. Even as a student it had somehow scared her. It was true she liked its language: on paper it amused her. 'Cherubimical', for example, which once described the happy drunk who goes around hugging everyone; but for every one of those there were dozens of 'lick-spigots' and 'tosspots'. Drunks could turn.

It spoke of the centuries of prejudice that had inhibited women's progress, denied them the space to achieve their potential. So that whenever we read of a woman in the past who was ducked as a witch, of one who was thought to be possessed by devils, or who silently mothered a remarkable man, we will be on the track of a lost poet, a forgotten storyteller who also dreamed, wrote, imagined. What if these women had been allowed to let their creativity run free and unimpeded? History had decided instead that they would go half crazed with fear and frustration, their words unsigned and unacknowledged.