Spot the connection between these two: I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. – Eliot’s Waste Land POPE’S BROTHER: I HIT CHOIRBOYS – Today’s Times You can’t work out the tense in either. The “read” in Eliot and the “hit” in The Times could both …
Listening to a snatch of the cricket commentary the other day, I was informed that the contest in Adelaide was gruelling. I confess that from our cold but snug cottage I couldn’t quite see how sunny Australia managed to gruel, but gruel it did. Gruel is one of those odd …
If you are squiriferous you are like a squire, which is to say that you are gentlemanly. It’s a fun word, if only because it is redolent of squirrels. Also the squ sound is irresistible to any thoughtful speaker of English. Incidentally, if you are both a squire and a …
I know it is a bit late, but let us talk about Hogmanay Hogmanay, the Scots New Year, is one of those words that sounds irretrievably non-Latinate, unless you remove the hogm, in which case it sounds exactly like the French word année, or year. Hogmanay is a mysterious word …
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 …
Yesterday whilst waiting for the Weaver to return, I was listening to some random music on the radio and on came David Bowie’s song Modern Love, and I was suddenly struck by the rhetorical arrangement of the chorus. Anaphora is the technical term for starting a series of clauses with …
Ah, the dreaded lurgy! That charmingly British term for when you’re not quite sure if you’re dying or just feeling so rubbish that you’d rather not risk the gamble. And to think it all started with The Goon Show, as if Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes decided the world needed …
Ah, Pluto—the celestial underdog, god of the underworld, and, curiously, also the god of wealth. It’s like the universe’s way of saying, “Money won’t make you happy, but it will definitely drag you into the depths.” So fitting that we get words like plutocracy (rule by the rich), plutocrats (rich …
Today marks the 77th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting—a milestone not only for UFO enthusiasts but also for lexicographers everywhere, as it gave the English language two fascinating new terms: flying saucer and pelicanist. For those unfamiliar, Kenneth Arnold was a businessman and aviator who, in 1947, claimed …
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 …
