Recent Posts

Road map or roadmap. One word or two?

In an up-to-date corpus of 20 varieties of English, roadmap is about twice as common as road map. In a corpus built in 2104, the two forms were even-stevens, just about, but by the time of a 2018 corpus the ratio was 3:1 in favour of roadmap. It’s a historical process that has happened repeatedly. When Jane Austen wrote any body she did not mean ‘any old cadaver’; body in her sense meant ‘person’.

Honey catches more flies than vinegar (2). A Pan-European proverb? On prend plus de mouches avec une cuillerée de miel qu’avec cent barils de vinaigre; Más moscas se cogen con miel que con hiel

Learning Italian in the UK is nowadays a minority pursuit. In contrast, in the late sixteenth century to know it was an important weapon in the intellectual armoury of the elite: Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth and James VI and I’s consort, Anne of Denmark, all knew la bella lingua. John Florio, the author of the first substantial Italian-English dictionary, was a groom of Queen Anne’s chamber and enjoyed a position at court. Torriano inherited Florio’s manuscripts and published in 1639 New and Easie Directions for attaining the Thuscan Italian tongue and the year after that The Italian Tutor.

Up to the knees in sleaze. History and meaning of the word sleaze.

Sleaze, I maintain, possesses excellent mouthfeel – as the wine buffs and foodies would style it. Which is why it rears its ugly head with greater than average frequency – statistically speaking – in journalese. If it had a colour, it would be orange. If it had a voice, it would sound loud and brassy.