…that’s how long it’s been since I posted anything.  Well, I’ve been busy, what with one thing and another, you know.
Nothing too weighty this time around – just a bit of fun. I must admit to having been quite stumped when asked by Madame Joad (who considers me something of an authority on English colloquialisms) [...]

While looking through the latest collection of toys to add to my web site, I came across something I thought to be intrinsically useless – a program to change all the text of a page into pig latin. It was supposed to be an easy way to tell which parts of a web page would [...]

Awright me ol’ chinas, come an’ read abaht stuff like rhymin’ slang, cockney roots an’ just ge’ a bi’ a cultcha.
Phew! Just like Talk Like a Pirate Day, I can’t keep it up – although it is, in part, where some of my original accent comes from. I am not a cockney – my true [...]

Maybe if you’ve been living in a cave, or as a goatherd in deepest Kazakhstan you won’t have heard of Google. Not an unusual word these days, but an interesting story. Google is now a verb as well as a trade name – it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary this year – [...]

It’s those Greeks again! Only this time, the word has been almost directly lifted from the language. From antonomazein, the word means “to name differently”. The pronunciation stresses the first and second syllables, so reads something like: an-tonn-oh-may-sya (do let me know if my rubbish phonetics help or hinder your understanding. Thanks!).
In the real world, [...]