Mind your language
`SURELY it should be fine-tooth comb (one with its teeth finely spaced)?' asks Martha Crewe (Letters, 14 June). 'Only a baleen whale needs a "toothcomb". '
So one might think, but it ain't so. The Oxford English Dictionary defines toothcomb as a 'small-tooth comb', and illustrates it at random with a quotation from 1902: 'The rake with which Mr Nield gathers together his authors is a very tooth-comb.' And the Shorter Oxford says confidently: 'fine-tooth comb, a comb with narrow close-set teeth'. It even adduces fine-tooth-comb as a verb. None of this would be at all suited to a baleen or any other kind of whale.
On the occasional topic of agreeable names, Dr P.R. Newman writes to me with the news of a sighting in Fulford cemetery outside York of a stone in memory of Eva Verdun Slaughter (born in the year of Verdun fighting in the first world war). 'When it is considered that her married name was Slaughter,' Dr Newman remarks, 'it makes one wonder whether she had any say in the choice of her husband or was impelled towards such a telling juxtaposition.'
Now I find Lord Rees-Mogg observ- ing in the Times that Mr Hague's fore- names are William Jefferson, and adding: 'I am a believer in the influence of names.' Perhaps. My husband points out that the well-known neurologist Russell Brain had as his predecessor at the London Hospital Sir Henry Head, but I don't know what influence on career choices such a name as William Rees-Mogg might have on one.
Dot Wordsworth
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