As I am in the habit of doing, I found myself in an idle moment the other day musing upon why the Scottish football team (that would be ’soccer’ to my American readers) Glasgow Celtic is pronounced with a soft c (an ’s’, in effect) rather than following the usual convention of the hard ‘c’ [...]

A bit busy today, so I decided to write a post which I can do bit by bit. Apologies in advance if it looks like I’ve done it piecemeal but that would be because I have. I was thinking today about the word “Ajax”. Why? Well, my office postman is Dutch and football mad. He [...]

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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 [...]

This is when pleasure is derived from someone else’s misfortune. It’s German in origin (bet you didn’t guess that) and comes from the two words Schaden (harm) and Freude (joy). There is no comparable word in English – I guess we’re all just too nice – so we borrowed it “as is” from German.
For a [...]