Christine Lovatt’s Hello Column
Christine’s Hello column appears monthly in Lovatts BIG Crossword magazine
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…]
Christmas around the world
In Japan, for example, celebrating Christmas has only become widely celebrated in the last few decades, and because there isn’t a high population of Christians in Japan, it is seen as more of a family celebration than a religious holiday. One Christmas Eve and Christmas Day tradition in Japan is the eating of fried [more…]
The word ‘stuff’
The word comes from Old French estoffe ‘quilted material, furniture, provisions’ from estoffer ‘to equip’ from the Greek stuphein to draw together’.
You can do stuff for each other or you can use it as ‘etcetera’ – “she learned ballet and yoga and stuff”. “That’s the stuff!” is said in approval of something that has [more…]
Binary & Hexoku
I’m very excited to introduce to you all the newest addition to our Handy magazine range – Handy Binary + Hexoku! The latest craze for lovers of sudoku, these puzzles offer a fun twist on the original format, and only require logical thinking, not maths skills, to solve. With more than 120 binary and [more…]
When in Rome
The popular myth of the founding of Rome is the story of twins Romulus and Remus who were reared by a wolf. They decided to build a city but when Romulus killed Remus after a quarrel, in 753 BC, the city was named Rome after Romulus. There are other theories though, such as the [more…]
Father’s Day
Papa, Vader, Baba, Apa, Dad, Daddy… There are many ways to say ‘father’, and many different definitions of the English word ‘father’ in the dictionary. Your father is your male parent, or a man who has raised you, a man can father a child, and a man who invented or started something can be [more…]