He's a hunky Denzel Washington lookalike. She's obviously Swedish: tall, blonde, blue eyes. You find yourself next to a striking couple. Suppose you're an American visiting Stockholm, and you're invited to a party. (Names and other details have been changed to protect the innocent). You're wondering what this has to do with Little Black Sambo, but I've saved my best story for last. The woman eventually gave in, but only after everyone else on the committee started laughing at her.

Isabel's father had to go and find a dictionary to convince her that 'manual' has nothing to do with 'man' it comes from the Latin manus, 'hand', i.e.

A woman objected on the grounds that it was sexist: it should be 'personal labour'. Her father was on some committee, and the phrase 'manual labour' came up in a document they were drafting. I loved the story we were told by our one-time au pair Isabel. While shopping at Tesco, I thought about similar incidents. Basing the word on the TV series would have been witty, but doing it the other way round was just stupid. The word 'metrosexual' was coined in 1994, by journalist Mark Simpson Sex and the City didn't appear until four years later. Surely this couldn't be a coincidence? But, after a quarter of an hour of googling, I had to admit it was. Sex and the City also started around then. the word 'metrosexual' started appearing frequently in the late 90s. most of the guys in Sex and the City are metrosexuals. Now 'metrosexual' is clearly a combination of 'metro' (city) and 'sexual' (sex). We'd been watching episodes from Series 1 of Sex and the City (by the way, these are infinitely better than the recent movie). In the shower, I had what I fondly believed to be a minor eureka moment concerning the origin of the word 'metrosexual'. I was reminded of this fact earlier today. When you work with language, you soon learn to be sceptical about apparently obvious explanations for where words come from.

Sambo and the twins helen bannerman