Edward Skidelsky
No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.
Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.
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Tom Chatfield
The humble "at": the spider monkey in German or snail in Italian
One of the joys of the digital era is the way it creates innovations in multiple languages. The “at” sign used in email addresses—@—has, for instance, earned a delightful variety of descriptions, from being called an elephant’s trunk (snabel-a) in Danish to a spider monkey (Klammeraffe) in German or a snail (chiocciola) in Italian. The internet also abounds, however, with all manner of symbols that haven’t as yet earned popular linguistic recognition: from the “vertical pipe with a hole in it” to the “checked ballot box,” and so on. For these, a word first coined in the early 19th century has come to the rescue: “dingbats.”
Since its first appearance in America in 1838, a “dingbat” has referred, among other things, to money, a professional tramp, a muffin, male genitalia, an Italian, a woman who is neither your sister nor your mother, a foolish person in authority and—most crucially for our purposes—a typographical ornamentation. If only English had showed a similar level of ingenuity when it came to naming the @.
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