English in use
Riotous words
Various English cities spent a good portion of last week dealing with rioting, avoiding the riots, commenting on said riots, and cleaning up the aftermath. Leaving aside the ongoing discussion regarding the causes and effects of these civil disturbances, it would be interesting to look at the word riot itself. Riot has been in use [...]
There’s nothing like a good spoonerism to tickle your bunny phone
The English economist Sir Roy Forbes Harrod (1900–1978) once said that, compared to all the scholars he had known at Oxford and Cambridge, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930) was the most exceptional in “scholarship, devotion to duty, and wisdom.” There is no reason to question Harrod’s assessment, but that’s not exactly the imprint for [...]
28 million words, one corpus, and thousands of fascinating insights
Have you ever been told as a child to ‘stop daydreaming’ and pay attention? Then you will be interested to know that daydreaming is a word that is invariably used in a negative context by adults but in a much more positive sense by children. Examples from the Oxford English Corpus (a vast electronic collection [...]
Wall of words: the Berlin Wall fifty years on
The Berlin Wall was built fifty years ago on 13 August 1961. Like the concrete wall, the word wall divides Europe linguistically. Some European languages, like German and French, form their words for wall from the Latin murus. So the German for Berlin Wall is die Berliner Mauer. English, Irish, and other languages use another [...]
Eating your words
“Keep your words sweet – you may have to eat them” is an aphorism often attributed to the French Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet, although variants of this phrase turn up in a number of other places. Grellet was perhaps a man who was aware of the etymological background of some English words for food, for [...]
A list of phobias from atelophobia to zelotypophobia
We define a phobia as ‘an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something’. You are probably aware of the more common phobias, such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces), and agoraphobia (fear of open places), but did you know there are also words which describe the fear of idleness, [...]
Why a catastrophe hasn’t always been bad news
The non-stop coverage this past month (at least in the United States) of the negotiations on raising the debt limit has propelled a number of words into prominence. Words and phrases such as ceiling, default, and credit rating have all received prime real estate in many newspapers. Along with these words, used largely in an [...]
What could be nicer than nice?
Picture the scene. I’m cooking lunch and put on some music to accompany the chopping when in comes Masie, who’s over from Washington. She picks up the CD case and looks at it with the sophistication that only a nine-year-old can manage. ‘Miss Harrison says you shouldn’t say that word.’ ‘Which word’s that?’ I say, [...]
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