I've been going through A Short History of Drunkenness for the American edition, changing those words and phrases that would be incomp...

An American asked me the other day why so many English pop stars sing with American accents. Actually, that's not true. An American at...

A repost from 2010: Eskimos have no more words for snow than we do. The notion that they do is a  myth , a mirage, and a cold white lie....

Sometimes an etymology is so obvious, once you see it, that you can't think why you never saw it at all. A dumbbell was, originally, a ...

Anybody who's read The Merry Wives of Windsor  (written in about 1598) will have been surprised to see a reference in it to Charles Dic...

I've just discovered that there is a Finnish word for "getting drunk at home in your underwear with no intention of doing anything...

Explained below My Spanish studies continue with all the alacrity and promise of an armada. I was idly flicking through the Psalms (or...