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Pineapple
It’s finally starting to feel like summer; time for sipping fruit smoothies in the sunshine, generous factor 30-ing and complaining that it’s too hot. I, for one, have indulged in a spot of light...
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Mortgage
A couple of days ago, Word Stories looked at a word which is different in English from almost every other language: while we say pineapple, most other tongues use some variation of ananas. This got me...
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Break a Leg
Today’s phrase up for consideration is one from the back catalogue in honour of my friend, blogger and director, and the performance of her new show. So for the cast and crew and everyone involved in...
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Muse
If I’ve learnt anything in the last couple of weeks it’s that working a nine-to-five-thirty job doing writey typey things is not conducive to frequent blogging. That being said, I have had time to muse...
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Happy Birthday Word Stories!
Happy Birthday Word Stories, you are one year old! But how old is one? Because in terms of etymology, one is actually a lot older than one. I mean, to be pedantic, it’s really at least 6,000. The word...
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Camera
One famous tourist sight right in the centre of Oxford is the Radcliffe Camera. Of course, the Radcliffe Camera isn’t a photography machine but a large 18th century building that is part of the Oxford...
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Printer’s Devil
I stumbled across a fantastic word at work that I have to share. It’s devilling. We also know the noun devil meaning ‘demon’ and that came from the Old English deofol ‘evil spirit’, which originated in...
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Linguistics and English Language Celebrations
It’s been a while since Word Stories’ last post but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been linguisticking. In fact, last week I returned to my old university haunts to celebrate the linguistics and English...
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What did Caxton do for us?
As promised in last week’s post, I’ve been following in the footsteps of the Crystals and have had a go at some English language tourism. I’ve been looking for William Caxton and his printing press,...
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Words from WWI
Today marks one century since the start of World War I. It was the first time the world had seen a truly global conflict, with soldiers from six different continents involved. So when these men from...
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Printing and publishing
As Word Stories looked at Caxton and the effect that his printing press had on English last week, I continued in a similar vein this week, by visiting the Oxford University Press Museum. It’s word nerd...
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Bailiwick
An odd thing happened the other day. I was reading an article on a website about land-based engineering of all things (for work, mind, I don’t read that sort of thing for kicks) and in that article was...
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Quintessential
A trip to the Oxford University Press museum a few weeks ago spurred on some thoughts about favourite words – surely a true lingthusiast has a good favourite word or two? The thing is there are just...
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Ampersand
Ampersand, meaning ‘and’, is a contraction of the hybrid Latin/English phrase ‘and per se and’, which was first recorded in the 1830s. ‘And per se and’ sounds like gibberish but, according to the OED,...
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Happy as Larry
I normally don’t like to discuss personal topics on Word Stories, except of course when it’s a source of something linguistically interesting, but this news is momentous enough to warrant tweaking the...
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Murder mystery
Last weekend was ‘Agatha Christie Weekend’ here, the town where the much loved murder mystery writer spent most of her life and which is also the location of her grave. It seems only right to pay...
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The Whole Gamut
There’s a nice article on oxforddictionaries.com at the moment about foreign words and musical notes, explaining why we use so many Italian words like piano, adagio, staccato and crescendo in our...
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