Sometimes only cockney rhyming slang will do. But get it wrong and you can end up looking a berk Among the hundreds of languages and dialects spoken in east London, there is one that should have a preservation order slapped on it. Spoken by a small and dwindling minority, surely it must be eligible for […]

A little-known American headmaster deserves to be remembered for his tongue-in-cheek grammar lessons Research for a book I’m writing has taken me down some obscure linguistic byways, the latest of which has been the discovery of Andrew Ingraham, an American teacher and writer of whom I’d never heard until stumbling across a brief mention in […]

The stigmatising language faced by left-handed people has not hampered their success Yes, that’s right, you’re about to read yet more lefty stuff in the Guardian. Barack Obama’s inauguration this week should again revive hope among a minority group. This group of people, simply because of the way they were born, have often been stigmatised […]

Sloppy use of scientific words is a symptom of a wider malaise “She’s developed something called anorexia.” “I was reading about that in the newspaper. It’s quite serious, isn’t it?” “Yes, and more young women are getting anorexia these days.” A simple enough conversation. What the speakers did not realise is that they were not […]

A book on international idioms reveals much about our national characters It was my French flatmate who alerted me to the clunkiness of British idioms. She taught me tenir la chandelle – the eloquently captured French idiom for the third wheel on a date. The image of a third person holding up a candle while […]

Try your hand at our quiz here The end of 2012 is nigh; so it’s a fitting time to reflect on the tastiness of the generous portions of popular orange vegetables dished up by the world of news in recent months. For the uninitiated, popular orange vegetables (Povs) are gratuitous synonyms employed often on subsequent […]