For the benefit of those who can’t receive BBC1 television, I shall start by saying that Garrow’s Law is a period courtroom drama, set in late 18th entury London. Garrow is a young barrister intent on improving the quality of justice for poorer people, and he is based, apparently, on a real person.

The developing plotline concerns his relationship with the wife of Sir Arthur Hill, and here is my problem: the BBC takes great pains to get the period detail correct in costume, stage setting and the like, but obviously this can’t be carried to the lengths of having everyone speak in 18th century London accents (in the same way, both British TV series of Maigret, starring Rupert Davies in the 1960s, and Michael Gambon in the 1990s also accepted that it was unrealistic to affect French accents). We’re now getting to my linguistic point.

The wife of Sir Arthur, who is either a knight or a baronet (which is hereditary), is regularly referred to as “Lady Sarah”. She has been thrown out of her home by Sir Arthur, on the grounds of her supposed adultery with Garrow, and deprived of her child (who although claimed by Sir Arthur to be  Garrow’s, is being brought up by Sir Arthur). The correct usage for the wife of a knight or baronet is not “Lady Sarah”, but “Lady Hill”. For her to be “Lady Sarah”, she would have to hold the title in her own right, as the daughter of an Earl, Marquis or Duke. If she is the latter, where is her family? Shouldn’t they be defending her against Sir Arthur? If she is so aristocratic, I think we should be told. If she has no family, and was ‘elevated’ to her position simply by marriage to Sir Arthur, then she is being wrongly addressed and talked about by the whole cast.

Whichever is the back story, something is missing.

Sad, aren’t I?

We’re all used to the so-called intrusive r in English – the ‘r’ pronounced after a word ending in /ɑː, ɔː, ɜː, ə/ when the following word also begins with a vowel. A few days ago, I heard one which was new to me, although perhaps it has just passed me by until now. Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home Editor, was talking about the possible eviction of travellers from Dale Farm in Essex, and he used the phrase ‘dénouement of …’

The intrusive r between these two words was unusual for me, as he clearly used a French-type nasalized vowel at the end of the first word: /deˈnuːmãrəv/. (Apologies for using /ã/ – I’m not sure how to add an accent immediately above a vowel.) I’m not aware that I’ve ever heard a nasalized vowel followed by an intrusive r before. If he had used a final /ŋ/, which the EPD allows as a possible English pronunciation – although neither ODP nor LPD gives this option – then an intrusive r would have been impossible.

I haven’t examined any of the literature on English pronunciation, but I don’t recall this possibility being mentioned. No doubt someone reading this will be able to point me to a reference.

The newspapers and news and current affairs programmes this week are full of Labour “apologising” for the mistakes they made during their period of office between 1997 and 2010. I do not remember politicians ever apologising for their own actions in government over the time when I have been taking an interest (about 50 years). They may apologise for slavery, which ended in Britain in the 18th century, although the slave trade went on until 1806, but that is an easy thing to do – no one can even remember a family member who was involved, they all died so long ago; but to apologise for things you did, or didn’t do, ten years ago – that is something new in my experience.

But something else changed when Labour came to office in 1997. Ministers when interviewed about their policies always insisted that this was the “right” thing to do. From Tony Blair to, especially, Gordon Brown, and all their subordinates, they one and all arrogantly suggested that having considered all the alternative policies, there was only one right course of action, and this was it. However arrogant the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major may have been, my recollection is that they only ever claimed that their policies were the best options, wording which allows more wriggle room if they subsequently need to be changed.

Perhaps if Labour had stuck to this less definite phraseology, they would not now be apologising for getting it wrong.

I’m surprised that no political commentators seem to have picked up on this.

They say (whoever ‘they’ are) that travel broadens the mind. In my case it’s just broadened my vocabulary. I’ve come back from a fortnight’s holiday in Germany with a new word in my armoury – cater-cornered. I had never come across this before, but it appeared in two separate guides, one in Munich, the other in Nuremberg. I was mentally pronouncing it to myself as /ˌkeɪtəˈkɔːnəd/ – by analogy with the word I was familiar with: the verb cater, and worked out by comparing the wording in the books with the evidence on the ground (“A is cater-cornered with B”) that it must mean ‘diagonally opposite to’, but I was totally bemused by this usage of what to me was a completely unknown word in a guide book translated from German, by a German (and I was telling myself yet again that you should never ever translate anything for publication out of your own language, but only into it), and that he/she was using a strange sort of dictionary.

The word is in none of the editions I have of Chambers’ dictionaries – my first port of call for ‘obscure’ words like this, but the 7th edition of the COD has it, without comment, pronounced as I have shown it above. The 8th edition however, specifies it as US, and changes the pronunciation to /ˌkætəˈkɔːnəd/. It’s not given in the 5th edition, and I don’t have ready access to the 6th. (The 9th-11th editions have gone back to /ˌkeɪtəˈkɔːnəd/, by the way, although OED3 retains /ˌkætəˈkɔːnəd/).

The most recent British English example given in OED3 is from The Listener in 1959: “A square cat, going cater-cornered among the leeks.” If I had read this sentence, I wouldn’t have had a clue what it meant.

Have I been missing something all my life, or is this an example of a word that has travelled to the US, dropped out of use completely except in dialectal British English, and unlike so many words, not yet come back? It does not, after all, make an appearance anywhere in the British National Corpus.