“It’s our xxx year anniversary today.” Which semi-literate started this? And why do seemingly educated people perpetuate it? An anniversary is the celebration, commemoration, observation, remembrance or recognition of something that happened on the same date in a prior year. The word “year” is unnecessary. Today is the 39th anniversary of my first date with my missus. I will not… Read more »
I don’t suppose your parents wrote down (or recorded?) your first words, did they? Or perhaps you actually remember them yourself; a babble that elicited tears of joy, and cries of “o-o-o-o-ohhh! You said your first w-o-r-d! I must phone your grandma/auntie/probation officer!” Most people’s first word is “mama”, and naturally mum gets excited because it was her that baby… Read more »
Where are you on the hedonist/libertine–puritan spectrum? As with much in life, moderation is surely the key, so you should be somewhere in the middle. (After all, we need balance, and fulcrums do tend to be somewhere in the middle…) Wine, women and song (or, according to your taste, absinthe, men and poetry; or moonshine, sheep and haiku) twenty-four hours… Read more »
One of my writing inspirations is the late Alan Coren, who wrote columns for several UK national newspapers, was the editor of Punch and The Listener at various times, was a panellist on a BBC radio satirical quiz show, and wrote several books, whose titles are guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of unsuspecting bookshop browsers. At one stage in his… Read more »
(This article is possibly Not Safe For Work (NSFW).) I have to admit that I’m not aware of ever having visited Scunthorpe. It’s a town in east central England that was (I believe) industrialized in the nineteenth century along with myriad other towns. Being the judgmental type that I am, I’ve never felt compelled to visit the place—just its name… Read more »
l’Académie Française has just announced that a set of 2,400 proposed changes to spellings and punctuations will be rolled out in school text books in the upcoming academic year. My knowledge of the Académie is not that great, but if I’m not mistaken, this is tantamount to revolution, not evolution. Apparently, these 2,400 changes affect approximately four percent of the… Read more »
For yearsandyearsandyearsandyears now, I’ve had a grudge against the word “nice”. It’s a nothing word. It’s a non-committal word. It’s bland, near-meaningless and flaccid. Plain. Vanilla. Un-descriptive. The trigger that caused my hate-on for the word was a British sitcom from the ‘70s, whose title and details now escape me. A guy had asked someone (partner? Friends?) their opinion of… Read more »
December is here and the turkeys are getting nervous. The anorexic one in the corner is laughing its miniscule head off, and the gluttons among them are wishing they’d not indulged in those food supplements quite so freely. If you accused me of fabricating those turkey thoughts, I’d plead guilty. Of course they have no concept of the meaning of… Read more »
Note: I have tried to write this in a way that won’t cause offence to most people. It does not contain any “bad” swear words until the very last line, but alludes to them several times. During my research for this article, I was shocked to discover that there is a significant and very vocal body of people whose opinion… Read more »
I was re-reading my article about the 2015 Word of the Year recently, and came to the section about Morse code. As that article states, the international prosign for a distress call is • • • – – – • • •. Without gaps between letters, this sequence of dots and dashes can mean “SOS”, “VTB”, “IJS”, “VGI” and “SMB”…. Read more »