The Sophisti-Cat with mini Hypnotique perfume by Max Factor
There is a fly in the ointment of my marriage. Or to put it more clearly, a wheel or two may have fallen off the stickiness of the marital wicket.
In so many ways, my husband is what P.G Wodehouse might have called a Good Egg. He is a wonderful cook, a charming and seductive companion and, crucially, he is tireless in tracking down rare fragrances on ebay. Sure, he is a shade elitist about perfume houses such that a mild yen for a bottle of Cuir de Russie by Chanel is a lot more likely to produce results than say, an urgent whim for a Max Factor Sophisti-Cat with mini bottle of Hypnotique cologne (pictured above), or even a desperate hankering for Fabergé Tigress with faux-fur top (pictured below), but a woman learns to live with these hardships.
Fabergé Tigress with faux-fur top
What more serious thing could be wrong with the bliss connubial? I hear you ask. And well you might.
Every morning, my husband says these words: “Today, I’m going to have a squirt of <insert some top-of-the-trees perfume name here>”.
I suspect that like the duchess’s baby, he just does it to annoy me. I think it is fairly uncontroversial that spritz is what is known technically as a good word to describe the application of fragrance in aerosol form and that squirt is bad word (all else being equal). But don’t take my word for it. Let us examine the evidence with three examples of usage culled from Google:
Squirt:
1) What on earth is a sea squirt?
2) How many ways can you make water squirt out of your mouth?
3) In Parra’s work the second Biot equation was extended to include the squirt-flow mechanism that was introduced by Dvorkin and Nur (1993)
Spritz
1) Facial Waters: Add 6-8 drops per ounce of pure water and spritz on the face. Lavender, Rose, and Orange EO make wonderful facial waters.
2) Uncover loaves and, using a spray bottle, spritz them with water and dust with whole wheat flour.
3) Spritz fragrance on your clothes and accessories, …
These hand-picked random samples show clearly that squirt is associated with gross things and daft boats whereas spritz is associated with bread, beautification and perfumedness.
In a perfect world, simply mentioning this painstaking research into how to speak good English would produce the required effect. On the other hand, he might just take to saying spurt.
Polly Fragrant 