A short “Word of the Week” today: kakistocracy, which means rule by those who are worst, or least suitable. It came up last week in a question on ITV’s quiz show “The Chase”. This definition from dictionary.com tells us that it was first coined in 1829 as “government by the worst element of a society,”… Continue reading Word of the week: kakistocracy
Earlier this year my daughter and I were driving past a pub called The Plough. I asked if she knew how to pronounce it, and what the word meant. She guessed, quite understandably, that it’s pronounced “pluff”, to rhyme with rough. (In fact it rhymes with “cow” or “now”, as I’m sure you know.) She… Continue reading Word of the week: plough
The word “nutter” is never far from my mind. I used it last June in this piece (“Please don’t tell me the names of the murderers”); more about that later. I have been meaning to draft a Word of the Week piece about it for a while. Before last week’s events here in London my… Continue reading Word of the week: nutter
Recently, while I was hunched over a spreadsheet on my laptop at the kitchen table, my 10-year-old daughter asked, “Is that Excel?” It was. “Can I show you something?” she asked. In a blank cell, in a new blank workbook, she typed the following: =1+1 When she pressed Return the number 2 appeared in the… Continue reading Word of the week: BODMAS
A yad is a pointer used in a synagogue to trace the text in the Torah. A rabbi will not run his finger across the parchment, he uses a yad instead. We learnt this over the weekend as part of my 12-year-old son’s RE homework, which involved learning at least three of the things that… Continue reading Word of the week: yad
A trencherman is someone who enjoys food, a hearty eater. An archaic meaning of the word is someone who sponges off others, a parasite. I finally looked it up today, having come across it over the years and not been in a position to do so, most recently while reading Marcus Berkmann’s “A matter of… Continue reading Word of the week: trencherman
During the general knowledge round on last Friday’s “Mastermind” John Humphrys asked the following question: Which word, now generally used to mean paralysed by fear, actually means turned to stone? The answer (and I’ve rather given it away with the title of this piece) is “petrified”. I’ve just checked the episode again. I thought that… Continue reading Word of the week: petrified
Breakonium is, according to Nicholas Lezard in this recent piece in the New Statesman, “the most fragile substance on Earth”. I read the piece and laughed aloud, not for the first time when reading one of his Down and Out in London columns, and have been using the word breakonium ever since. It’s not an… Continue reading Word of the week: breakonium
Last year I wrote about homophones, words which sound the same but are spelt differently, like rowed, road and rode. A heteronym, on the other hand, is a word that has multiple meanings and pronunciations but is always spelt the same. “Bow” and “wound” are examples. The meaning and the pronunciation only become clear from… Continue reading Word of the week: heteronym
Last week’s piece about the word “disconsolate” made me think, briefly, of other words that sound like the opposite of something but are not. You can be disconsolate but not consolate, uncouth or unruly but not couth or ruly. It also reminded me of the word “Dystopian”, which is the opposite of “Utopian”. It’s a… Continue reading Word of the week: Dystopian
The Compartments 