New from the last e-magazine issue
Spissitude In January 1924 the Atlanta Constitution reported that spissitude had been added to others, such as thermometer and truly rural, as words the New York police used to test the sobriety of midnight revellers. What the word meant was ...
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Piss-poor It certainly sounds like folk etymology, except that the piece is clearly a mischievous attempt to deceive its readers. As with other tongue-in-cheek suggestions about origins, a grain of truth exists. Urine has been widely used ...
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The Language Wars Henry Hitchings’s previous works include a biography of the man he wrote his PhD thesis on, Dr Samuel Johnson. Here he turns to the history of disputes about what constitutes good English. To call it warfare is to ...
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Beggar-my-neighbour It may well be misused, though I’ve not found examples. The ones I’ve looked at all employ it in the sense of an advantage gained by one person or group at the expense of another. It’s used especially of a nation ...
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The next website update
The next update to this site is due on 5 March. You may then, among other things, find out more about the rare word phrop, discover the dismissive unitasker and look into the origins of the American expression that’s all she wrote. Had you joined...