Tags and coinages

 The most recent Word of Mouth on Radio 4 was fascinating. (Incidentally, how good it is to hear Michael Rosen practically recovered from his long Covid experience.)  It looks as if Ralph Keyes' new book on word coining will find its way onto the booshelves here, in spite of my mental resolution not to add anything more to the clutter. In his interview with Michael Rosen, Mr Keyes was refreshingly unpedantic about his work, accepting that, while correcting many misattributions, we may never know what was the source of some of our favourites.

One anecdote intrigued me. It seems that Winston Churchill was a deliberate coiner. "Summit" as applied to meetings of heads of government was one of his. He also liked short, single nouns to replace lengthy descriptions of everyday objects. One he tried to have adopted was "klop" for hole punch, which however has not taken off. Churchill did not like stapling papers, preferring to string them together on tags, a process which pre-digitised civil servants know well and one which in retirement many still find useful. I still have quite a few "liberated" from the old Ministry of Transport. Those items are widely known as "treasury tags", and they are still sold by WH Smith under that description. Perhaps Smith's continue to use the colour coding for length - red for the shortest tags, purple for the longest. Anyway, my contribution to the story would be that the official description in the stationery catalogue was not Treasury, but India tag, because the useful little item was invented in the historical India Office.