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Susie DentHuffPost |
When the New Yorker magazine was starting out, its editors apparently weighed up the benefits of adopting “co-operate” over “cooperate”. They...
“Cheer up love, it might never happen”: a sentence guaranteed to make any glum passer-by feel even worse than they did already. Judging by the sea...
If you decided to tune into the election debates this week, you might find the etymology of the word “arena” rather appropriate. The word comes...
The one thing we can be sure of in the next four weeks is a lot of bumf: bumf through our letter boxes, bumf in our inboxes, and virtual bumf on our...
“I’m not bossy, I’m the boss”: a characteristically skilful sentence from the singer-songwriter and businesswoman Beyoncé, who used it in a...
It’s not often that a new addition to the dictionary makes my heart sink. I’ve spent decades on the side of evolution, greeting every new word as...
Few dictionary definitions in recent memory were as hotly anticipated as the one for “Brexit”, which in 2016 had us all desperate for an escape...
A few years ago, academics at the University of London confirmed what West Country farmers have suspected for years: that cows have an accent. The...
Crapulence. It’s a word to conjure with, and it may be one you need. Born in the 18th century, it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as...