Christine Lovatt’s Hello Column
Christine’s Hello column appears monthly in Lovatts BIG Crossword magazine
Mother’s Day Around The World
Mother’s Day is celebrated in many parts of the world, although on different dates. The modern form we recognise now originated in the United States, observed on the second Sunday in May. In the UK, Mother’s Day is also known as Mothering Sunday and is held in March, usually the fourth Sunday of [more…]
Improve your memory with mnemonics
In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory. She was one of the daughters of Gaia and Uranus, and as the mother of the nine Muses she represents enchantment, inspiration, and the power of remembering. She is said to know everything, past, present, and future. A mnemonic device, named from the same [more…]
$100,000 Magic Money Winner!
We have a winner! Congratulations to Christine H for winning $5,000 in the Lovatts Crosswords & Puzzles $100,000 Magic Money competition.
Like the $100K Cash Splash before it, the Magic Money draw was a fantastic chance for Christine and the Lovatts Crosswords & Puzzles team to meet one of our wonderful and loyal Lovatts puzzlers in person. It [more…]
How to enter Lovatts DIY Contests
The DIY has been one of our most popular contests in Christine’s BIG Crossword magazine for years and the team and I are always amazed at how clever the entries are.
We are always overwhelmed by the huge effort all our DIY contest entrants make to create a crossword and write the clues. When [more…]
Continents
German geophysicist Alfred Wegener was the first to advance the idea, in 1912, that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth, and coined the term Continental Drift but this idea was not accepted until the 1950s.
Ancient Greek mariners were the first to make a distinction between continents, when they gave [more…]
The moon in English language
The noun ‘moon’ is thought to derive from the Proto-Indo-European mēnsis, meaning ‘month’. The moon’s waxing and waning have made it a symbol of time, change, and repetitive cycles around the world, such as the cycle of birth and death.
The moon has been personified in various myths and legends from across the world, such [more…]
Shakespeare & flowers
Although Shakespeare wrote his plays over 400 years ago, in some ways the world he wrote about has hardly dated. For instance, the plants he referred to in his plays are the same ones we’re familiar with today.
In his Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon tells Puck to squeeze the juice of a flower onto the [more…]
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Where would we be without punctuation? If we didn’t have any, the sentence
“Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off”
would leave you wondering. Instead the sentence should [more…]
Christmas words
Christmas words often appear in our crosswords even outside of the season. The word Christmas can sometimes be clued as ‘Noël’, ‘Yuletide’, or ‘Present-giving occasion’.
Noël is a French word from the Latin nātālis meaning ‘a birth’. ‘Natale domini’ is another Latin phrase related to nātālis, meaning ‘birth of the Lord’. The given name Natalie [more…]