Posts by Andrew Delahunty

The whole kitten caboodle

Today is Brigitte Bardot‘s birthday. Joyeux anniversaire, BB! The former French film actress caused a sensation in 1956 when she appeared in And God Created Woman, the film that established her reputation as an international sex symbol. Her first scene finds her sunbathing in the nude – in her birthday suit, as it were. In [...]

Posted on: September 28 2012 | Posted by: | Comments: 0 | Categories: English in use | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

A Trojan Horse in the Tardis: it’s all an allusion…

At the beginning of October the Guardian newspaper published a survey of the best independent bookshops in the UK. Two were described in strikingly similar terms: ‘A Tardis among bookshops, [it] appears narrow at first glance, but packs a lot inside’ in one case, and ‘The Tardis-like bookshop is beautiful, with a stained-glass window depicting [...]

Posted on: October 27 2011 | Comments: 6 | Categories: English in use | Tags: , , , ,

A smorgasbord of fusion words for the Twitterati

In March 2011 the social networking site Twitter, launched in 2006, celebrated its fifth birthday. Amid all the media discussion of tweeters, trending, and followers, the term Twitterati has cropped up quite a bit. It’s an odd-looking word, and an example of an interesting and creative variety of word formation, where a word is borrowed [...]

Posted on: April 11 2011 | Posted by: | Comments: 0 | Categories: English in use, Word trends and new words | Tags: , , , ,