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The Most Popular Posts of the Inky Fool
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This post has already gone up twice; but, as it's the one on which I worked hardest, and as this blog is always gaining and losing adh... -
Just a brief post as I'm running round the country giving talks (Booka Books in Oswestry tonight). I met a German-speaking lady in Edin...
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Because of all the attention this post is getting, I ought to point out that I was not intending to disclose some outrageous Orwellian con...
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I've been staying in the flat of an American friend and found amongst his books an American-English dictionary . It is a slim volume, a... -
A poop-noddy is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: Sexual intercourse (rare) I don't know about you, dear reader, but I... -
Here is the updated list of the fifty most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, including all the readers' suggestions. We started ... -
If I wish to do an impression of a Chinese chap, I will not allow myself to be hampered by the fact that I don't speak a word of Mandar... -
Pluto was the god of the underworld. He was also the god of wealth. That is why we have plutocracy (government by the wealthy), plutocrats ... -
Back when I was writing The Horologicon , there was one word that I desperately wanted to include. But I couldn't because I didn't ...
Another word that is actually useless, and doesn't even sound very nice: got.
ReplyDeleteTwo things come to mind: my Anglo-Saxon prof telling us "Seamus Heaney translated 'hwæt,' which means..."hwæt"...as 'so,' and he got beat up for that;" and John McWhorter's discussion of the "meaningless do" in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
ReplyDeleteGood article in The Telegraph. A marker, yes, but perhaps not entirely useless. It often indicates 'something is coming/has been said of import' ('So - we shall have to see what happens...') or as a preliminary to ending a conversation. 'So - great to see you, must be off now.'
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