oh my word!

If you’ve been channel surfing over the festive period you’ll probably have found several hundred episodes of the sitcom Friends.

The 1990s show wasn’t bad, as American comedies go, but you should take care not to trust it as a reference work for the habits of marine crustaceans.

Perhaps I should explain further. One of the characters, Phoebe, giving advice in what has become quite a famous scene, said: “She’s your lobster. Lobsters fall in love and mate for life. You see old lobster couples walkin’ around their tank holding claws.”

It’s a cuddly theory and I’m sure it served the show well in whatever unlikely plot the episode was unravelling. But it is nonsense, lobsters don’t mate for life. However, the phrase: “My lobster” (I will be with you for ever) has become a recognised phrase.

Though Phoebe was wrong about lobster mating habits, she could have made a (rather cleverer) point about her lobster claim becoming an example of words that appear to be unbreakably welded together.

There is a word for this, collocation. The only time you ever see the word “nigh” is in “the end is nigh” or “nigh on impossible”. The only time “pangs” are mentioned is when they are hunger pangs. “Shrift”, an old word that used to mean absolution from a priest, is now rarely seen except as part of the collocation “short shrift”. And I don’t recall the last time I saw thither outwith the grand old phrase “hither and thither”.

The list goes on. The only thing you “gird” is your loins. “Vaunted” (boast about or praise) is always part of “much vaunted”. The only “gotten” is in “ill-gotten gains”, although the Americans use gotten as a past tense of got.

I hardly ever come across “beck” unless part of “beck and call”. Do you ever see “lo” unless in “lo and behold”? Or “afoot” outside “changes afoot”, or sometimes “trouble afoot”, or Sherlock Holmes declaring “the game is afoot”? And the only time people are ever referred to as “sparks” is when they are “bright sparks”.

My favourite, or perhaps least favourite, is “broad”.

Now you might argue many things are described as broad: rivers, brushes, hips. But no one seems to be able to use the word “daylight” without putting “broad” in front of it.

This is especially true when describing crimes. I don’t think a criminal act has been committed in mere daylight for years.

Steve Finan in defence of the English language