What is an acceptable answer to the question, “How are you?” When I was young the usual response was “Fine”. One of my late uncles used to be annoyed by this. “Fine?” he would say. “Don’t say you’re fine, say ‘I’m well’.” These days “How are you?” is usually met with a different answer: “Good”,… Continue reading Word of the week: fine
CamelCase involves capitalizing one of the letters in a word to make it look like two words. The following words all use CamelCase: PowerPoint, WordPerfect, YouTube, McDonald’s. I had never heard the word before until there was a question about it on “Only Connect”, a second round question where the contestants have to say what… Continue reading Word of the week: CamelCase
Just a quick Word of the Week, or six, all based on the same four letters. Can you think of a group of four letters that can create more anagrams than “opst”? I’m using the Scrabble convention of arranging them in alphabetical order. “Opst” is not a word but opts, post, pots, spot, stop and… Continue reading Word of the week: opts (post, pots, spot, stop, tops)
Windows 10 is taking up more of my time, at home and at work, than when I wrote about it in this piece. Microsoft tell us that this is the last-numbered version of the operating system. There will be no Windows 11. The word that I use most often to describe this new version is… Continue reading Word of the week: busy
Pangram is the kind of word you try to think of at times and can’t quite remember, rather like palindrome. A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards (civic, Anna, noon or “Rats live on no evil star”). A pangram is a phrase that contains all the letters of… Continue reading Word of the week: pangram
A pronoun is, simply, a word that takes the place of a noun. He, she, you, they and it are all pronouns. They (pronouns) can cause trouble. When pronouns come up in conversation (and they do) I usually recall a story that Lesley Anne Down told in the early 1980s on the TV show “Clapperboard”.… Continue reading Word of the week: pronoun
A few years ago one of my favourite cousins in Ireland had an operation to remove a “congenital wart”. We joked about how bad that sounded but we knew that it wasn’t. “Congenital” means, simply, that she was born with it. It doesn’t mean that it was big, painful or dangerous, just that she had… Continue reading Word of the week: congenital
My first encounter with the word “banter” was in this Monty Python sketch, wherein RAF pilots fail to understand each other’s reports of recent flying missions. “Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper’s and… Continue reading Word of the week: banter
A simple dictionary definition of fungible is “replaceable by another identical item; mutually interchangeable”. I find that an example and a comparison is more helpful. Money is fungible. A £20 note can be used to buy anything up to that value. Time is not fungible. The time that you spend commuting to work is not… Continue reading Word of the week: fungible
Sometimes you encounter a word in a few different contexts in a short space of time and then you don’t hear it again for a while. Palimpsest was like that, back in January and February, and I haven’t come across it since then. The word crummy (which means “not very good”) appeared three times in… Continue reading Word of the week: crummy
The Compartments 