Christine Lovatt’s Hello Column
Christine’s Hello column appears monthly in Lovatts BIG Crossword magazine
GalleryHello – BIG July 2014
The words desert and dessert look similar, but they are very different in meaning.
Now and again, one of our crossword clues seems to hit a nerve with our puzzlers and we get a sack of mail (or a deluge of emails) claiming that a gremlin has been found. Sometimes we have made an error [more…]
GalleryHello – BIG June 2014
I recently received a query about a clue from a general knowledge puzzle in our Colossus magazine that went: ‘seedy fruit believed by some to be Eve’s Garden of Eden fruit.’ The answer is not apple, as many might think, but pomegranate, although some also feel it may have been a fig.
But it made [more…]
GalleryHello – BIG May 2014
Rat: a rodent that resembles a large mouse, typically having a pointed snout and a long tail.
I’m sure some of you will recoil with horror at the mention of rats, because of the bad press they have had for years...
GalleryHello – BIG April 2014
“Be not afraid of greatness;
some are born great,
some achieve greatness,
and others have greatness
thrust upon them”
William Shakespeare
Hello – BIG August 2013
There may have been a time when all the lands of the world were joined. Way back in 1596, Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa ... by earthquakes and floods".
GalleryHello – BIG July 2013
Words, just like us, come from families. Some are related to each other and have ancient ancestors.
It’s not always an obvious relationship. For instance, the words free and friend both came from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to love’.
You wouldn’t think there was a connection between biscuit, precocious and concoct but they all come from [more…]
Hello – BIG June 2013
The English language is like a high-speed moving train, with new words jumping on and old words dropping off constantly.
Most of the words we use in the English language today are of foreign origin. Many basic words came from Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian and English still derives much of its vocabulary from Latin and Greek, [more…]
GalleryHello – BIG May 2013
How much difference does one little letter make in a word? Take the T in egotism for example. You might think that there’s little difference between egoism and egotism, and they do have their similarities. But there is a major difference...
GalleryHello – BIG April 2013
When we hear something we don’t understand, we say “It’s all Greek to me”. This might be closer to the truth than we realise, because about a quarter of the words we use originally came from ancient Greek, either directly or through Latin and French.
‘Brotherly love’ in Greek is philia, [more…]