Back in the dear old Dark Ages, when all was umbrous, the French borrowed words from the Germans. Some of these words began with a W, which the French, being French, found hard to pronounce and changed to a G. But not all the French did this. The northern Frenchmen …
The Romans loved astrology and did everything according to the Seven Planets, which wandered across the sky. So far as the Roman were concerned there were the Fixed Stars (all those ones in the background that never move in relation to each other), and then there were seven things visible …
I saw a film last night.. It was about Charles Darwin and at one point he was talking about how he hadn’t enjoyed training as a doctor: ‘All those wretched patients,’ he said. And there was a flicker in my mind. Did he mean by this that the patients were …
Once upon a time, there was a Latin noun scintilla and it meant spark. We all know what a spark is: it’s the tiny little point of light that flies out of fire or fusebox. And because sparks are so tiny we got the English word scintilla, meaning tiny little …
The only reason T.S. Eliot insisted on his middle initial was that he was morbidly aware of what his name would have spelled backwards without it. Auden (whose H was idiopathic) wrote a palindrome on the subject: T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it …
The word elaphine means of or pertaining to a stag. Therefore, stag nights, stag parties, stag dos, stag drinks, stag weekends and all such hideousnesses could be rebranded elaphine nights, elaphine parties, elaphine dos, elaphine drinks and elaphine weekends. I feel this would somehow make them better. At least it …
I have just received an email alerting me to a sale at Sweaty Betty, which for the uninitiated is a shop selling fashionable sports and fitness clothes for men and women – in some cases so beautifully designed that customers are inspired to take up certain sports simply for the …
Ah, the perils of being a precocious child. At the tender age of seven, armed with what I clearly believed was an air of intellectual maturity (or maybe just a growth spurt?), I tackled Jane Austen’s Emma. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a happily ever after. The helpful librarian, …
Almost everybody knows that it is wrong to use apostrophes before an ‘s’ which denotes a plural rather than a possessive. So it is “breakfasts” and “tomatoes”, not “breakfast’s” (which I saw on a sign yesterday) or “tomato’s”. But what about plurals of words made up of initial letters, like …
The name “Bluetooth” might conjure up images of glowing blue lights, but its true origin story takes us back to a Viking king with a rather unusual nickname. Harald I of Denmark, who reigned in the 10th century, earned the moniker “Bluetooth” for his role in uniting the warring provinces …
