We are often told that London is a global city. People come from all over the world, to visit and to set up home here. If you travel on our public transport system or walk our streets you will hear scores of languages being spoken. As a Londoner I am happy about all this. I… Continue reading “Reporting anything unusual won’t hurt you”
Earlier this week while driving down the A40 to collect my son from school, through the tunnel under the Hanger Lane Gyratory and past the Hoover Factory, I spent five minutes or more behind a Portuguese truck. It had a sign on the back that read “Veiculo Longo”. It’s a phrase I have seen before,… Continue reading Veiculo Longo
Last week I wrote about compartmentalization, with its 20 letters and 7 syllables. I noted, in this menu piece, that the only other word with 7 syllables that came to mind was homosexuality (13 letters). I’ve discovered another one. It currently features in trailers for various TV and radio programmes being advertised on the BBC:… Continue reading Letters and syllables
How do you spell words like minimize, maximize and theorize? Do you spell them with a “z” or with an “s” (minimise, maximise, theorise)? I’m a “z” man, not an “s” man, and have been for over 30 years. Back in the 1980s someone in publishing explained to me that “z” was closer to the… Continue reading “-ize” and “-ization” or “-ise” and “-isation”
At least one of the following things happens every day of my life: I notice yet another song on TV, radio or a playlist that rhymes “heart” and “apart”; I have to type a whole word on my phone that has not been anticipated by predictive text; I hear someone say “No pressure” in an… Continue reading “No Pressure”
There hasn’t been a strike by local refuse collectors (or bin-men as we used to call them) for many years. I can’t remember the last one in our corner of West London; 30 years ago, maybe more. Occasionally in those intervening decades there have been strikes elsewhere in the UK and they will make the… Continue reading “The rubbish is piling up in the street”
Differed, deferred, offered, occurred: words like this featured in my 9-year-old daughter’s Spelling List last weekend, along with swimmer, travelled and others that either repeat the last letter of a verb when used in other forms, or they don’t. It got me thinking about rules of spelling and how we generalize information as we learn.… Continue reading Differed and deferred, offered and occurred
In March I read Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”, her memoir mainly about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. When she first met him, on her arrival in New York City, she was looking for some friends who had moved on. He was lying on a bed, she told him of her plight and “he rose in… Continue reading Huaraches and Bobby Pins
Biopic and wannabe are two words I came across many times in newspapers and magazines without knowing what they meant, and without any immediate way of looking them up. These days online dictionaries and other resources make it easy to look up any word but it was different in the 1980s. Back then you’d come… Continue reading Biopics and wannabes
Once again my 9 year old daughter’s homework has prompted me to think about language and learning, as in earlier pieces about Adverbs and Homophones. She has studied apostrophes before and it was part of her homework again last week. It’s a good example of something where the broad principles are straightforward, and can be… Continue reading Apostrophes
The Compartments 