If you call someone a Nazi just because you disagree with them, you have already lost the argument Fraped. For the unacquainted, it’s a perturbing portmanteau of "Facebook" and "raped" something that happens when you forget to log out and forget to cut out that annoying practical joker friend from your life. Rape is an […]

With 814m voters, 29 languages spoken by at least 1m people, and 447 mother tongues, India’s election is a test of linguistic as well as political skills British journalists: if you think you’ve got it tough trying to appeal to a global English-speaking audience, spare a thought for the candidates in this month’s Indian general […]

‘I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.’ As Woody Allen discovered, fast is not necessarily best During the last few weeks, my internet feeds have been inundated with links to Spritz, the new speed-reading application that lets you read a novel in less than 90 minutes. […]

Take a linguistic tour a holus-bolus fidge-fadge, if you will around some of Britain’s most charming forgotten words When I examined the wonderful collection of glossaries of county dialects I realised just how monastic was the zeal with which the Victorian lexicographers went about their compiling. Just as they collected the rocks, butterflies and ancient […]

Slang should be celebrated, not condemned. It enriches our language from bloomers to booty, from cool to ceebs, and from doing a Lohan to LOLZ The borderline-cult film Mean Girls contains an amusing insight into young people’s eagerness to leave their linguistic trademark on the world. Schoolgirl Gretchen Wieners describes any pleasant situation as "fetch" […]