Christine Lovatt’s Hello Column
Christine’s Hello column appears monthly in Lovatts BIG Crossword magazine
Hello – September 2016
If you are one of those people (like me) who makes lists, you will be interested to hear that Peter Mark Roget was such a man. If he hadn’t been, we might not have the wonderful reference book known as Roget’s Thesaurus
Roget was highly qualified in several fields. He was a physician, scholar and [more…]
Hello – August 2016
Our distant cousins don’t necessarily look like us so we shouldn’t be surprised that in the world of vocabulary, word families have relatives who share a common ancestor, but have distanced themselves from each other.
The Latin word sanguis meaning ‘blood’ gives us both sanguinary ‘bloodthirsty’ and sanguine ‘happy’. Perhaps this is a hint about [more…]
Hello – July 2016
Some parents or grandparents call their children lambs, or chickens – affectionate and loving terms. Many of us call our children kids.
Kid comes from a very old Norse word for a baby goat. The word has been borrowed and applied affectionately to small children for centuries, maybe because baby goats are so cute, [more…]
Hello – June 2016
The word pig probably comes from the Old English picg and once only meant ‘young pig’. Adult pigs were called swine. A hog was a castrated male. A boar is the tusked, Eurasian wild pig from which our domestic pigs are descended.
To go the whole hog means to do something as completely as possible, [more…]
Hello – May 2016
Whether you are a mother yourself or you are lucky enough to still have one, now’s the time of year when we honour mothers and also, to look at the word ‘mother’. It comes from a very ancient source – the Sanskrit language. You could say Sanskrit is the mother of many languages. Their [more…]
Hello – BIG April 2016
Much has been written about William Shakespeare, especially this month as we celebrate the anniversary of his death, 400 years ago. He was born on 23rd April 1564 and died on his birthday in 1616, at the age of 52.
Although his original plays and poetry are peppered with words like ‘doth’, ‘thee’ and ‘wherefore’, [more…]
Hello – BIG March 2016
Has it ever struck you as odd that Easter is represented by a rabbit sitting in a basket of chocolate eggs? For a start, rabbits don’t lay eggs, and furthermore, why are they made of chocolate?
Many of the words associated with Easter are connected to the Northern hemisphere springtime and predate Christianity. The name [more…]
Hello – BIG February 2016
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…]
Hello – BIG January 2016
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…]