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 …
Pancallism is the belief that everything is beautiful, or at least everything that exists, which is quite a lot of things. The idea, occurred to some medieval scholastic philosophers. Their reasoning went roughly like this. God exists. Existence is one of the features of God. All the features of God …
It appears that in the male’s endless and drooling search for sexual gratification, the breasts seem to act as beacons. Particularly in Western culture they are a means of enchantment, to some they possess magical qualities. They do, however, seem to be revered beyond rationality. Much has been written, sculpted, …
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 …
