“Has Tom lost his spherical glass playthings?”, I hear you say. Not at all. The rather lovely and fun title ‘Crash Blossoms’ is, in fact, the term now used for headlines in newspapers, magazines and journals that just don’t read quite right. The term itself comes from an American editor based in Japan, one Mike [...]

Warning: The opening paragraph contains references to RSS. If you have no idea what this is, you could do worse than read this simple explanation. If you like the sound of it, you’ll be pleased to know you can follow my updates via RSS as well as Twitter – just click here.
Shameless self-promotion aside, I’m [...]

Are you all sitting cumftibold two-square on your botty? Then I’ll begin…
I have fond memories of watching (and listening) to the work of Mr Stanley Unwin. He was a very interesting entertainer, even though he only did one thing, which was to talk nonsense. So, although it’s not strictly a ‘word’ du jour, I thought [...]

While I’m prepared to admit that I don’t know every single word in the English language, it’s a rare weekend indeed where I come across two words I have never heard of. This, dear reader, was such a weekend.
Sitting around chatting with three ladies, to whom I am variously and differently related, the word Gamine [...]

In a slight departure from the norm, I’m going to write about a language – one that isn’t English. There are those who would tell you that Welsh as a language is dead and not relevant any more but I don’t think so. They have television, radio, books and newspapers in the language and from [...]

To quote from one of the BBC’s finest comedies ever made, Blackadder:
Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Yes, it’s like goldy and bronzy only it’s made out of iron.
Strangely enough, Baldrick is actually correct. The word Irony also exists as an adverb meaning “consisting of or containing iron, or having iron-like [...]

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Apologies to Stephen Fry, but I saw this on an episode of the BBC television series QI and wanted to share it as I found it, well, Quite Interesting.
For those of you who [...]