Purple Words on a Grey Background

Some blogs (including this one) require you to type in a random word to show you are a human and not a spam-bot or the like. The words are, ...

On May 2, 2011 it will be 400 years since the Authorized Version (often referred to as the King James Version ) of the Bible was first publi...

We recently caught up with some telly viewing, which included a couple of episodes of George Gently, the police stories set in Tyneside in 1...

I wasn't really listening, but on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I heard something like: "It's not the Lord's role to b...

The recent concern over Prince Harry being caught using the term "paki" on a video raises interesting questions. How much can con...

The whole Ross / Brand thing has raised quite a debate about bad language on TV, and more generally in society. I've recently correspond...

Yellow road sign in M6 contraflow: Free Recovery. Await Rescue. When did you ever hear anyone use the word "await" in spoken Engl...

My son was looking for theme tunes for his school English group - it was a task they were set this week. He settled on Paperback Writer by t...

Debs texted the other day, saying she was having tea and circuits . Better than coffee and bald , I suppose.

What's the opposite of 'big up'? Neg down? And what's the opposite of cool? It can't be hot, because some things that ar...

Following on from being northern, it led me to think about where 'the south' begins. (Berwick if you're Scottish). For the Engli...

For some reason I was thinking about the Python sketch where someone can't say the letter 'c' and it comes out as 'b' (h...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there does seem to be a fairly recent trend in suggesting that 'soccer' is a US-English term for wh...

Steve asked if I wanted people to join in with this. Please do - just add your own suggestions in the comments.

Invent a new definition for a known word - just for fun. Biomass: a service of Holy Communion with an environmental theme

A recent radio programme was lamenting the number of clichés being used by presenters and newsreaders. It made me wonder when something beco...

Outwith. It's a word that gets used in College meetings to mean outside - as in "let's deal with that outwith the meeting"...