Category Archives: Edwardian English

Nurse Katharine

Several people have asked me why ‘Kittie’ is not spelt with a ‘-y’. The answer is that the spelling ‘Kitty’ is reserved for private, more intimate use, for example between Kittie and George, Kittie and Nina (‘Dinah’) Corbet, Kittie and … Continue reading

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Language issues again

The version of Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ published in The Times (see my post of 21 September) seems to contain a misprint in line 11: ‘stanch’ instead of ‘staunch’ (‘to the end against odds uncounted’).  Last week I was in the … Continue reading

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Kittie again

The other ‘st’ word of the Edwardian period is ‘stout’, as in ‘stout fellows’ (used by soldiers of their comrades).  It is described in dictionaries today as ‘arch.‘, and meant ‘dauntless’ — another word that today surely qualifies as ‘archaic’. … Continue reading

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Kittie

It should be clear from my posts of 18 and 27 August that Kittie Calderon felt deeply frustrated by her husband’s ‘finality’, as she called it, about going to the Front when no-one was asking him to enlist at the … Continue reading

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