Yearly archives: 2012
A comic quotation quiz
Moliere wrote in La critique de l’école des femmes (1663) that ‘it’s an odd job, making decent people laugh.’ In the hopes that 2013 will be filled with delightful oddity and humor, we present this quiz, drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. Edited by the late Ned Sherrin, the dictionary compiles words of [...]
Automotive nostalgia
A few weeks ago, when a character on TV mentioned his DeSoto, my daughter asked, “What’s a DeSoto?” “A car,” I answered, choking on my realization that there was no reason for a 25-year-old to have heard of a DeSoto. But I had actually ridden in a DeSoto—and not in an antique car parade. The [...]
Under the auspices of white elephants?! The origins of phrases, punctuation marks, and Cockney rhyming slang
The root of auspices and the more familiar adjective auspicious are closely linked. If something is auspicious it bodes well, giving promise of a favourable outcome. In Roman times, people tried to predict future events by watching the behaviour of birds and animals. An auspex [...]
Bathtub gin, blind tigers, and bootleggers: the language of the speakeasy
We’ve a lot invested in the idea of Prohibition as an era of wild drunkenness, all-night parties and lawlessness. And such language! Back in the day – in this case from early 1920 to late 1933 – it became increasingly fashionable in urban areas for celebrities and the upper-middle classes to get dolled up in [...]
Should it be everyone for themself where grammar’s concerned?
Where do you stand regarding the pronoun, themself? Is it perfectly OK to use it, or do you reckon that it’s beyond the pale? When I blogged about reflexive pronouns a while ago, I promised to revisit this grammatical outsider. Judging by the debate on the Net, themself stirs up much passion, with several pundits [...]
Skivers, scroungers, and Lapwings
Bloody Lapwings. Running around the countryside with their stupid haircuts, messing around while the rest of us do an honest day’s work. Here’s a fact the RSPB won’t tell you: over 90 per cent of British Lapwings are unemployed in any [...]
Appointment with Words: where does Agatha Christie feature in the OED?
Tomorrow sees the anniversary of the death of Agatha Christie, a doyenne of the whodunnit, or as the celebrated humourist Ogden Nash put it, a murdermongress. In a career spanning 50 years, she wrote over 60 detective novels, as well as collections of short stories and plays. In addition, she indulged her romantic side by [...]
An underground railway by any other name: seven subway monikers explained
This week marks the 150th anniversary of the opening of the world’s very first underground railway, in London. As this revolutionary mode of transport caught on across the globe, locals dubbed their underground railways with unique titles.From the Tube in London, to the clockwork orange in Glasgow, find out more about the reasons behind these [...]
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