America will always be top dog

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Ali Shamkhani, one of Ayatollah Khamenei’s top henchmen, who is facing a fierce backlash in Iran over his daughter’s revealing wedding dress. Videos of the event show the theocratic hardliner, who led the National Security Council during the government’s violent crackdown on women’s rights protests in 2022, escorting his daughter as she wears a strapless, low-cut white dress. He doesn’t appear too bothered by the controversy, posting on Twitter: “I’m still here, you bastards.”

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Richmond council in west London, which fined a woman £150 for pouring her coffee down a drain. Burcu Yesilyurt was spotted by three enforcement officers and issued with a fixed penalty notice under Section 33 of the Environment Protection Act 1990. After initially insisting its staff had acted “professionally and objectively”, the council has now cancelled the fine.

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Penguin and Club chocolate bars, which can no longer be classed as chocolate bars because they contain so little chocolate. McVitie’s has tinkered with the composition of the biscuits because cocoa prices soared after a poor harvest in West Africa. Both snacks are now labelled as “chocolate flavoured”, and the slogan for Club has been changed from “if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our Club” to “if you like a lot of biscuit in your break, join our Club”.

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Water bottles, according to Ian McEwan, who has railed against the modern obsession with carrying H20 everywhere. “Thirty years ago, nobody had bottles of water,” the 77-year-old author told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. “You had a drink from the tap when you got home. And suddenly we were persuaded that you can’t go 10 minutes without being thirsty. This is a derangement.”

The mysterious origins of English words

Words come from all sorts of places, says Joshua Blackburn in Literary Hub. “Nicotine”, for example, was named after Jean Nicot, a diplomat who brought tobacco to France. “Poodle”, the water-loving dog, comes from the German word “pudeln”, meaning to “splash in water”. Some are mysterious: gizmo, hijack, flabbergast and queasy have no known origin. Others have been twisted by “folk etymologies”, like the idea that “marmalade” stems from “Marie est malade”, which was supposedly whispered to a seasick Mary Queen of Scots, “presumably while munching marmalade on toast”. (The word is actually borrowed from the Portuguese, who got it from the ancient Greek for apple.) And there are plenty you may have heard down the pub which are total balls: “Cabal” is not the initials of the plotters seeking to overthrow King Charles II; “Posh” isn’t an acronym for “Port Out Starboard Home”; “Crap” has nothing to do with the plumber Thomas Crapper.

As language evolves, words get “lost, altered or inverted”. Ping, swipe, text and troll have all changed their common meaning since the internet. Language purists enjoy pointing out that “decimation” technically means “the slaughter of one in ten people” and that a “myriad” is 10,000 of something, rather than an “indeterminably large number”. “Awful” once simply meant “filled with awe” and in the 1940s, a “blockbuster” wasn’t a cracking film but a sizeable bomb. Back in the 1500s, “bully” was an endearing term for a friend and in Old English “meat” described any type of food. “Silly” was originally a Scottish word meaning worthy or pious. And an “ovation” wasn’t raucous applause, but the “modest reception” given to a returning military commander in ancient Rome who had fallen short of a triumph.

Back in the 1990s, at the height of public animosity towards Camilla Parker Bowles, the celebrity autograph hunter Andrew Broughton sent her a letter, says Ann Lee in The Guardian. “I just want you to know,” he wrote, “that not everybody hates you.” Camilla wrote back to thank him, telling him that receiving such letters “restores my faith in humanity”, and the pair began corresponding regularly. When Camilla married Prince Charles in 2005, Broughton was invited to stand outside Windsor Castle. “She came straight over,” he recalls. “She said: ‘It’s lovely to put a face to the name. Don’t stop writing.’” Camilla then introduced Broughton to Charles, who told him how much he’d heard about him. “She’d obviously been talking about me. It was quite a surreal day.”