Once upon a long time ago in France, there was the word étiquette . But it didn't have the meaning that it has today. Etiquette was not...

Usually, parodies of Shakespeare are rubbish. People think that if you throw in a few thou s, prithee s and marry nuncle s that that's ...

The temple of Portunus If you're a sailor in a sailboat then you care a lot about winds, and the best sort of winds are those that b...

POLONIUS: My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently. HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? ...

Dust used to be the subject of poetry. Hamlet, in his great prose speech, asks of mankind: And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of d...

I have been asked by Twitter whether there is any connection, however tentative and tangential, between hobnobbing and hobbledehoy . The s...

Foolscap paper is one of those things that I've never really been sure about and to which I have never devoted even the idlest of my id...

Shakespeare stole most of his best ideas from The Simpsons . So Mr Burns' great line "Release the hounds" is repeated in much...

And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from t...

I'm always a little suspicious of these things, but here is a scene from Shakespeare in what is supposed to be the pronunciation that w...

Any reader of Inky Fool will enjoy this . It's a site that estimates the size of your vocabulary. You start off with some reasonably ...

Ophelimity is the capacity to satisfy a need, desire or want . It's an economics term, but I can think of at least a thousand non-econ...

Pausing on Lamb's Conduit Street yestereve I saw a troop of Morris dancers waving their sticks about. For those of you who have never...

Last night I went to see All's Well That Ends Well at the Globe . A line in the play made me think of the Beatles and Our Mutual Frien...

Just a link today, because I'm feeling lazy and faineant. Here's a little article on how Shakespeare introduced starlings to Ameri...

According to the news : Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kil...

I was casting about in my tiny mind for something about regal nuptials, and couldn't think of anything. However, I did remember a story...

There is, dear reader, a precise word for not being able to remember the precise word: lethologica . This was sometime a paradox, but next ...

Today is, traditionally, Shakespeare's birthday. So here is Shakespeare on the subject of getting old. He wrote a lot of sonnets about ...

Havoc is a funny old word. I think that I only use it myself in the phrase play havoc , as in "Ortolan plays havoc with my digestion...