Criticise. “It might be worth mentioning,” emailed Michael Bawtree, following my comment last week, “that because the verb criticise is no longer used in a neutral sense, the verb critique has taken its place. As a verb and a noun, critique refers to a neutral judgement of something. Why the French form has kept this objectivity is an interesting question.” Peter King made the same point and added, “The noun critic seems to swing both ways, as it were. The expression ‘it has its critics’ suggests only disapproval but it is still possible to say ‘the critics loved it’ without apparent contradiction.”

Animadvert. Patrick Martin sprang to the defence of this word, which I discussed last week: “I must protest. It must be tough on a word to be called obsolete in its primary meaning by the writers of dictionaries. I have used it for years to mean ‘refer to’, maybe in a mock-pompous way. I never even knew that it had a derogatory meaning.”

Rogetisms. Of this word in the last issue, Malcolm Ross-Macdonald mused, “Combining Rogetisms with homophones could produce an almost uncrackable code, as in ‘Cos brisket rump velocipede castoff’. By the time the spooks had parsed the first word as ‘lettuce’ the proposed meeting behind the bicycle shed would surely have come and gone.”

Twigging it. I used the verb twig in last week’s issue, which provoked this reply from Ben Wise: “I have no idea what this means, although you used it in passing, with no indication it might be as research-worthy as everything else in today’s collection of mystery words. Twig is also used in the BBC article you linked under uptalk. I suspect it’s a Britishism which hasn’t yet made the hazardous journey across the pond. Please clarify for us benighted New Worlders in your next post. Thanks.”

My pleasure. It is a British colloquial term, meaning to understand or comprehend something. It dates from the eighteenth century, meaning to watch or inspect and then to discern or recognise. Near the end of the century the noun came to mean style or fashion, from which came in twig, in fine twig and in prime twig, all meaning stylish or admirable and all long since defunct, though the root verb has survived. The Oxford English Dictionary says of this sense of twig, “Origin unascertained”; Jonathon Green tentatively suggests an origin in dialect twick, to jerk.