Welcome to my Desk, where you’ll find all sorts of items to hold your interest. Unlike my real office desk, which is cluttered with books, files, news cuttings and the remnants of my lunch, this Online Desk will be efficient and easy to navigate.
Learn some of the tricks of solving those weird cryptic crosswords on my tutorials page.
If you wonder about the origins of some of our wonderful English expressions, Words & Phrases is the place to find out more.
Read about the puzzling but positive effect Lovatts has on your health in Puzzles & your Health. We’d love to hear from you, so write a letter to Christine’s Mailbag. You might want to comment on my regular column @ Christine’s Hello.
There’s something for everyone here, so come on in!
Latest Posts
Keeping You Posted
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 played a huge part in communicating with [more…]
The origins of Father’s Day
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 only established as a national holiday in [more…]
A Taste Of Spain
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, but there’s also a long list of [more…]
Prefixes & Suffixes
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 ‘not’, as in disconnect or disease (the [more…]
Fast Friends
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 verb ‘to remove a person from your [more…]
Ring The Changes
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 is with words. As English evolves, word [more…]