Some words catch on, and some words need a helping hand. Gelett Burgess , who was a writer and humourist and artist etc etc, invented the w...

Those of you who follow the news (and, as Evelyn Waugh said, News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. An...

As a little follow up to Monday's post on The Charge of the Light Brigade , it's quite astonishing how many clothes are associat...

Once upon a time there was a village in Dorset called Piddle. Or, more precisely, it was listed in 1212 as being called Pidela Walteri, w...

Tomorrow, I'm going to be doing a word surgery in conjunction with the lovely people at Waterstones. The idea is that you can go onto T...

As a devotee of Tennyson, I've always been horribly irritated that he's best known for his worst poem: The Charge of the Bloody Lig...

There's a rather ungentlemanly term for a woman in Britain: bint . It doesn't mean anything in particular, it's just a synonym ...