Category Archives: Blather

Where do those Portuguese lexicographers find the time for anything else? Continue reading →

A puppy’s not just for Christmas — the leftovers are fine on Boxing Day. Continue reading →

and faintly ridiculous deadhead that I am, I have just found the most wonderful resource. Continue reading →

The sucking backwash of his reputation was still gurgling down the beach as I grew up. He wasn’t quite dead then, though so drunk that he might as well have been; but he was the poet who had been inescapably … Continue reading → Continue reading →

does this to a brain. Or maybe the pink is what happens to the brain when you watch seven hours of television a day for a fortnight. Continue reading →

Topstyle is the insomniac’s friend. Do you like the redesign? Write on only one side of the paper. Lie if you must. Continue reading →

The phrase turned up in my search requests this morning; I don’t know why, since I couldn’t find myself in Google on the subject. I did, however, find this list of colours for boy’s dolls. Continue reading →

Sex in vegetables works. Actually, I was wondering where fruitless plants have their seeds: once they’ve been pollinated, where do the seeds appear? I still don’t know. Continue reading →

When it says on my resume that I used to be the chief reporter for the Spectator, it doesn’t mean this one. Heteronym isn’t the right word, either, though it’s groping in the right direction. Continue reading →

We have hyperbole. But what about the complement of the process, in which a word gradually loses all its force as a result of constant overuse? Awesome, brilliant, classic, original …. all these suffer from hypobole. Continue reading →