Language Lovers

talking red

Celebrate National Poetry Day

This year’s annual National Poetry Day, the thirty-eighth, falls on Thursday 7 October. National Poetry Day (NPD) was founded in 1994 by an arts charity – the Forward Arts Foundation – and has gone from strength to strength, boosting, inter alia, sales of poetry: the graph… Read More
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Is the autumn equinox the start of a new season?

There are just a handful of astronomical events that non-specialists like me know of, and one of them will be upon us very soon: the autumn equinox. On 22 September 2021, day and night will be equal in length across the whole world. How so?… Read More
talking red

New Conversations Day

Conversation had a very precise meaning for Dr Johnson, he of dictionary fame and a conversationalist par excellence. When his biographer, Boswell, asked him whether there had been good conversation at a dinner party, he declared: ‘No, Sir; we had talk enough,… Read More

World Refugee Day

Sunday 20th June 2021 marks World Refugee Day, an initiative by the UN which highlights the power of inclusion and standing together to build a stronger, safer world for us all. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which defined a refugee under international law, this year… Read More

World Music Day

‘If music be the food of love, play on’ must be the second best-known quote from the Bard. These words uttered – or crooned in some performances – by Duke Orsino, who is in love with love itself, constitute the very first line of Twelfth Night. 21 June marks not… Read More

The One With All The Friends Vocabulary

Nearly 20 years after the final episode aired, fans around the world rejoiced as Friends: The Reunion finally graced our screens. As the cast toured the iconic sets and reflected on fond memories, we started reminiscing about the show’s classic words and phrases that have stuck very firmly in our… Read More

Say Something Nice Day!

Nada cuesta añadir una sonrisa, ‘It costs nothing to add a smile’, is a Spanish phrase imprinted on my memory from when, years ago, I taught myself to touch-type in Spanish and it was one of the practice phrases. It’s an apt recollection, for 1 June is Say Something… Read More
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