One of the great pleasures of life, I feel, is receiving a letter in the post. I mean a friendly letter of course, not a bill, a speeding fine or a sales catalogue. When I first arrived in Australia, many moons ago, phone calls were only used in case of emergencies and the post [more…]
The first Mother’s Day church service was held in 1908 and it became an American national holiday in 1914. It’s natural to assume a Father’s Day soon followed, ensuring that both parents received the recognition they rightfully deserved. However, this was not the case. Father’s Day was first celebrated in 1910, and it was [more…]
Our linguistic history is closely tied up with the major Romance languages of Europe, especially France, Italy and Spain. Spanish words figure largely in our English vocabulary, due to the historic ties between Spain and Britain over many centuries.
Take the culinary world, for example. We think of tapas and sangria as typical Spanish fare, [more…]
When we come across a word we don’t know, we can often work out what it means by knowing what the prefix or suffix means.
We know, without having to think about it, that the prefix un turns a positive into a negative. Happy becomes unhappy, done becomes undone. Dis means ‘the opposite of’ or [more…]
The word befriend was being used back in 1559. In all the time since, the opposite hasn’t been needed – until now. What does it say about us?
The word unfriended (meaning ‘friendless’) has been around since Shakespeare’s time and the noun unfriend (meaning ‘enemy’) since the 13th C, but when it comes to the [more…]
It’s an immutable fact, whether we like it or not, that we change as we grow older, whether for better or worse. We might become less flexible but wiser, our cooking might improve but our memory doesn’t. Our crossword-solving skills advance, of course – but sadly it gets harder to read the clues.
So it [more…]
It’s hard to imagine a picnic basket or alfresco spread these days without a few internationally-inspired bites tucked between the sandwiches and lemonade. Whether you’re in a park, on a beach, or simply basking in the garden, outdoor dining often invites a menu rich with borrowed words. Even if you know what these tasty [more…]
Coral reefs may be home to a spectacular array of life, but they are also teeming with mystery and meaning. Even the word coral invites curiosity: it stems from the ancient Greek korallion, itself a borrowing from older Semitic languages. Originally, it referred not just to living organisms, but to the precious, hardened skeletons [more…]
The English language has many words for that sparkly, spirited attitude to life, which have been adopted from various languages.
Panache was originally a French term for a tuft of feathers on a helmet and now means flamboyance.
Pizzazz, meaning glamour or vitality, is of unknown origin. Some describe it as ‘an indefinable dynamic quality’.
Brio is [more…]
