Rigmarole is an unusual word with an interesting origin. It is used to describe something disconnected, rambling and difficult to see a way through. It is now well over 700 years old and dates back to 1291 when the Scottish noblemen signed a deed of loyalty to King Edward I …
Advertisers and politicians latch on to fashionable words to sell their products – remember vision, excellence, and mission statement? The 2000s have seen a plague of the word passionate, particularly in the more liberal leaning newspapers. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), its main senses are “marked by anger, …
Scientists in the 1500s noticed that changes in the volume of a liquid or gas were accompanied by consistent changes in its temperature. To accurately measure these changes they devised thermoscopes, the simplest of which were glass tubes, with one end projecting into a vial of water. Rising temperatures would …
I have a new book coming out in a few weeks – The Men who stare at Hens published by The History Press. It is intended as an homage to some of the wonderfully dotty individuals of the Emerald Isle. To give you an idea of its content I have posted below …
I’ve just discovered that there is a Finnish word for “getting drunk at home in your underwear with no intention of doing anything else”. The word is kalsarikännit. This is important news. At first, I didn’t believe it. There are a lot of amazing-foreign-words-with-sentence-long-definitions that either don’t exist, or only exist …
It was, I believe, a certain M. Étiemble who devoted a whole book to the condemnation of what he called Franglais – the long-term debauching of French by commercial English (strictly speaking, commercial American). However such a liaison may be refused benefit of academy, nothing can prevent its becoming a …
I’ve never liked the word comedienne. I don’t know exactly why, but it bugs me. There’s something about the faux Frenchiness of it. It might be condescendingly sexist, or it might be tediously feminist, and either way it rankles. So I was immensely pleased when I happened across the word …
It is, perhaps, appropriate that the English word lecher comes from the French for licker, although it may rather cramp the thoroughgoing lecher’s style. The French for lick is still lecher, which is why the French for window shopping is faire du lèche-vitrine, which literally means to go window licking. …
Sometimes, the original meaning of a word is so bloody obvious that you can’t believe that you don’t use it that way any more. Such a word is handsome, which apparently is as it does – a phrase I have never understood. When you realise that handsome used to be …
One of the great images of history is that of Martin Luther (1483-1546) lighting the blue touch paper starting the Protestant Reformation by nailing his famous ninety-five points to the doors of All Saints Catholic Church in his hometown of Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. This image is still very …
