Everyone is doing this, even Aled Jones on the radio this morning. Here you can look up words that first appeared in print in the year of your birth. Most of mine seem very technical but one is ‘vodka martini’. Who knew?

nappishness (n.) sleepiness; a tendency to nap

My stop on the blog tour! Hop off the bus and read on.
Ever heard of nappishness? It first appeared in print in Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1851.
‘Moby-Dick is also credited with introducing a fairly niche set of words into the English language, including cetology, the study of whales, and plum- ( Read more... )

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Call me a boring old pedant, but. I've been constantly irritated in a book I'm reading by references to 'cannons'. Now I've just seen the same usage on the BBC news website in connection with the Waterloo commemorations. Isn't the plural of cannon, cannon? As in
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them, etc.?

If I'm wrong, I take it back.

I just scored 100% in Staples’ grammar test. I’d be ashamed if I hadn’t.
This is a very easy test, which a number of authors and book editors would fail.

Roses Over a Cottage Door posted about favourite words and coincidentally I’d been having similar thoughts. My word is ‘mysterious’. A favourite silly song of mine at the moment is Jessie J’s Price Tag, especially these lines ( Read more... )

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