60. WORD OF THE YEAR: PARASOCIAL
16/12/2025
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For as long as humans have told stories, every new technology has been accused of killing creativity. The printing press, the typewriter, photography, film, the internet — each innovation sparked anxiety about the decline of human imagination. Today, the worry has a new target: artificial intelligence. With AI models capable of drafting poems,...
58. THE RARITY OF WRITING
16/09/2025
As somebody who works with text for a living, writing sometimes feels as innate as speech. I was therefore surprised to learn that it's one of humanity's rarest inventions, emerging only four times independently: in Mesopotamia before 3100 BC, in Egypt around 3250 BC, in China before 1250 BC, and in Mesoamerica before 1 AD. Every script owes its...
Last month, Chris sought to understand – insofar as any sane person can – the use of language by Donald Trump. Is he a skilled orator playing 4D chess? Or just a teenage boy trapped in the body of a 78-year-old man? In any case, his unusual use of capitalisation has a surprising forebearer: 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson.
Reading a typical Truth Social post from President Donald Trump is a wild ride, rhetorically speaking. Apart from the name-calling and the ALL-CAPS DECLARATIVES about how weak his enemies are, there's the weird thing he does with capitalisation, where he caps the beginning of words for seemingly no good reason. Trump doesn't save his odd linguistic...
55. X MARKS THE SPOT
19/12/2024
X(Christ)mas is on the doorstep, and th(an)x(ks) for that! Twitter's become X and we'll soon be xxx(kiss)ing under the mistletoe. So, maybe it's time to shine a light on the letter 'x'. As a standalone with many a meaning, it deserves to be centre stage, if just this once.
54. THE IDIOT'S APOSTROPHE
13/11/2024
I simply couldn't help it, after my claim in September's blog that you hadn't seen the last of the apostrophe yet! A few weeks on from that blog, I came across this article (below) in The Guardian by Philip Oltermann, European culture editor, dated Mon 7 Oct 2024 (Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets official approval...
53. ACCENTS ARE FOREVER
15/10/2024
A few months ago, a viral video caught my attention: 19-month-old Orla from Liverpool 'speaking' fluent scouse without saying a single real word. While she can't yet do what we'd define as talking, she has the sounds and intonations of her local accent down to a T. And it's almost certain she'll sound largely the same as an adult.
52. APOSTROPHE: PANIC ATTACK
10/09/2024
Whether it concerns the possessive form or pluralisation, the apostrophe always seems to signal one of two reactions: panic or complacency. Let's take the possessive form for proper nouns (names) for starters. Debate about this started soon after Joe Biden cleared the way for Kamala Harris to run for US President last month. Is it Harris' or...
Translation is tricky enough when fluent in the target language, but Pedro Carolino took things a step further with his 1855 Portuguese-English phrase book English as She is Spoke. Unable to speak any English, Carolino used a French-English dictionary to translate an earlier Portuguese-French guidebook, resulting in such idioms – or 'idiotisms', as...
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