“Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough” – Paul Simon
I wouldn’t have thought that carpenters, stonemasons or other craftsman had a predilection for cunning strategies or slyness. Yet both artful and crafty, with their sly implications, used to mean talented and skilful. Now they are more often used to describe [more…]
Strong women have always had a powerful impact on history, and yet it’s only in recent years that we’re seeing the proper credit and recognition they rightly deserve for their contributions. Not only that, but through a concerted effort to increase the gender imbalance in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering & maths), we are [more…]
Good news this month for anyone whose birthday falls on 29th February – this is a Leap Year so you can celebrate your birthday on the correct day instead of 28th Feb or 1st March. Or maybe you don’t mind not having a birthday, because you claim to be only a quarter of your [more…]
This month it’s St Valentine’s Day once again, and so much has been written about romantic love, in stories, poetry and song, that you might think there is nothing left to say. But it seems that we never tire of the romantic dream, which after all makes the world go round. Love will never [more…]
The English vocabulary is famous for having so many descriptive terms, but every language has words that are hard to translate into English and yet would be an interesting addition.
The Japanese language reflects the way Japanese people have a great respect for nature and the changing seasons.
Komorebi means ‘the sunlight that filters through [more…]
Have you ever wondered if there’s a connection between the two meanings of second? It means both ‘a sixtieth of a minute’ and ‘coming after the first’. Also, the two meanings of minute, ‘a sixtieth of an hour’ and ‘very small’. Well the fact is, they ARE connected.
When the hour was divided into sixty [more…]
There’s no doubt that many expressions we use in everyday life come straight from the silver screen or from television.
To be stepforded is to be secretly replaced with a submissive robot. It comes from the film The Stepford Wives, in which all the wives in town are turned into compliant and submissive women [more…]
The name David is of Hebrew origin meaning “beloved”, and it’s probably true that everyone (at least in the Western World) knows a David or Dave.
The first David we know of was a musician and shepherd boy who killed the Philistine giant Goliath with his slingshot. He was rewarded for his courage by Saul, [more…]
We are lucky that our English language is grammatically gender-free. About a quarter of the world’s languages use grammatical gender, which means it’s a lot harder to learn a language where you must remember which gender each noun is. Some of the languages that use this system are German, French, Spanish, Italian and Gaelic. [more…]
