It helps if you’ve been on Strictly Come Dancing, but anyone who has been in the public eye for more than about two minutes is eligible “National treasures are often fools and worse: dare I say that until last year Jimmy Savile was perhaps the greatest of them all?” Tanya Gold wrote in the Guardian […]

Familects – home dialects in which words are given private meanings – reveal that everyone has a creative and playful linguistic story Hearing a couple I know ask each other to pass the “splinkers” – their word for sweeteners – reminded me of the English Project’s collection of family slang, Kitchen Table Lingo, the blurb […]

The vocabulary and grammar of spoken South African English are coated in a fine layer of Afrikaans dust. It’s been there so long that most of us no longer notice The first English lesson I ever gave was in a little language school in a sprawling Taiwanese city. The theme was Fruit, a subject about […]

The people who brought us jeggings, skorts and coatigans have decided the letter S is no longer fashionable I love fashion. I mean really love it. I can become obsessive about the cut of an ankle boot, I dream of one day hunting down the perfect silk blouse in just the right shade of oyster, […]

For a supposedly dead language, Latin exerts an enduring appeal. You can even make love in it That a journalist’s knowledge of Latin enabled her to break the news of the pope’s resignation suggests reports of its death may have been exaggerated. A BBC article, Who speaks Latin these days?, quickly returned to the default […]

A riposte to homophobia from the poppy end of hip-hop may be the most profound song either genre has produced I was never one of those “I’m, like, so cool I listen to bands that haven’t even formed yet” types. It was pop all the way – camp, often ridiculous and always cheesy. This left […]