So it seems wrong to think that once upon a time we scattered our speech with noble phrases from the Bible and Shakespeare, but now can only summon up secondhand wit from TV ads, even if it’s true that some authors of letters to The Telegraph end them “Simples!”, for want of anything better to put before their signature.

That’s bad, and I get quite annoyed to hear “Lovely jubbly”, as though it were bound in itself to bring joy, rather than being a mere catchphrase from Only Fools and Horses. It was first used there in 1989, as a tacit adaptation of “lubbly Jubbly”, a 1950s advertising slogan for an orange-flavoured drink in a triangular-pyramid packet. In my schooldays it was sometimes frozen and sucked free of its flavour through one chewed corner.

Such phrases are annoying partly because they are associated with recent decades and have gone out of fashion, like words such as groovy or fab (though that has come back in, half-ironically). But an origin in Shakespeare is little guarantee of cultural superiority. Take be-all and end-all. Often it is used to express disapproval of someone who gives himself airs, thinking himself the be-all and end-all, as though he were the only pebble on the beach. Macbeth, though, used it in quite a different sense: that it would be fine if the murder he contemplated was the end of the affair.

We deploy plenty of phrases from Shakespeare, unaware of their origins. The same goes with the Bible. The skin of your teeth is now used for “a very narrow margin”. It comes from the Book of Job in the very literal translation of the Authorised Version. What Job meant by “I am escaped with the skin of my teeth” is hotly disputed, but that does not affect its common meaning today.

It’s trivially true that when people heard the Bible read out in church they often picked up phrases from it. Now we share advertising slogans in common: “Vorsprung durch Technik,” I heard Tim Harford say jocularly on Radio 4’s More or Less last week. How could anyone use it not jocularly?