If you’ve ever played the game of trying to talk on a subject for two minutes without saying um or er, you will realise just how much a part of our everyday speech is the interjection.
The um, er variety are called ‘filled pauses’ giving the speaker time to think of the right words. It’s [more…]
Life in the past was based in the countryside far more than it is today and country people came in for a roasting, wordwise.
The word villa meant ‘country house’ or ‘farm’ and gave rise to village, villein ‘feudal peasant’ and villain. Villain now means the bad guy in a story, a criminal or [more…]
It’s that time again, when here at Lovatts we take a break from our synonyms and antonyms, clues and conundrums, to simply say Happy Christmas to all our puzzlers. We hope you all have a peaceful break in the true spirit of the season.
It’s interesting that although it’s a Christian celebration to remember the [more…]
Shakespeare was the first to use beetle as a verb. In Hamlet he writes, “the cliff that beetles o’er his base into the sea”. Here beetles means that it hangs over – like a shaggy eyebrow?
Beetle-browed means having shaggy overhanging eyebrows, which is odd considering that
beetles don’t have eyebrows but big horns.
To beetle about [more…]
French lawyer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825 “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. Or as we say nowadays – we are what we eat.
Maybe that is why we have always used food to describe the various aspects of our lives.
Your head was once referred [more…]
As I write this column, the person who has been the holder of more nobility titles than anyone in the world has died today. At 88, she was also one of Europe’s wealthiest aristocrats.
Maria del Rosario Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva was born in 1926, in the Liria Palace, Madrid, only daughter of [more…]
We associate Easter with chocolate eggs and a long weekend, but once Easter was bigger than Christmas. It still is in many denominations, a far more important event to Christians.
Christmas, being our big razzmatazz celebration, when families get together, with decorations and presents, puts Easter in the shade, but Easter was once a similar [more…]
One reason we have so many synonyms is a legacy of English history.
Anglo-Saxon was spoken until the Normans invaded England in 1066 when William the Conqueror made French the language of the courts. Anglo-Saxon was spoken by the peasants and French by the aristocracy, which is why so many English words have twins. [more…]
