Christine Lovatt’s Hello Column
Christine’s Hello column appears monthly in Lovatts BIG Crossword magazine
Christine’s Hello column appears monthly in Lovatts BIG Crossword magazine
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…]
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…]
I read recently that the most common word in the English-speaking world is no, with okay as a runner-up.
But what about the most commonly used word in the world – English-speaking or not?
Words such as radio, bank, café, chocolate and beer are understood in many countries even though they may have their own [more…]
A mocha coffee, for instance, is named after the seaport of Mocha in Yemen where the arabica coffee was shipped from.
The word bungalow, meaning a single-storey house, comes from India, from the Hindi word for a low thatched house, bangla meaning literally ‘Bengalese house’.
A sturdy fabric called serge, made in the French town [more…]
As I sit down to write about Christmas, as I do at this time every year, it occurs to me that my Christmas as a celebration is gradually changing.
As a child, it was about the Nativity scene, about singing carols, the delicious aromas in the kitchen where Mum was cooking turkey and mince pies. [more…]
A mascot is a person or thing that is supposed to bring good luck, especially one linked to a particular organisation or event. Some of our clues for mascot include ‘Lucky emblem’, ‘Lucky symbol’ and ‘Team pet’.
The word mascot is derived from the French term mascotte meaning ‘good luck piece’, which ultimately came from [more…]
Crossword lover Dorothy Lyall recently asked me how I compile crosswords.
I start off with the black and white pattern of squares which we call a grid. This grid has to be carefully designed so that there are no two-letter words, not many very short or very long words (ie a reasonable number of words [more…]