Language Lovers

‘Project Fear’, ‘Feel the Bern’, and ‘Titan Secondaries’: February’s Words in the News

If I told you about a forthcoming referendum on whether a certain country should remain in a certain political union, and that the campaign to leave this union had branded the campaign to stay in Project Fear, you’d probably assume I was talking about Scotland in 2014. But in… Read More

What’s all the snoise about? Lucy Mangan looks at some of your recent word submissions

Forgive me if I am not quite myself at the moment. I am heavily involved in a friend’s ‘wedmin’. She introduced me to the word and consequently the plethora of miseries it covers. It’s short for ‘wedding administration’, regarding which there are no other abbreviations, short cuts, abridgement, truncations, condensations,… Read More

Etymology corner – We take a look at the word ‘Leap’, on the run up to Leap Day

As you will no doubt be aware, the current year has an extra day inserted at the end of February, making it a ‘leap year’. The word ‘leap’ developed from the Anglo-Saxon verb hlēapan. It is one of several words of Germanic origin that in Early English began with the… Read More

Did we give up new words with the wine this dry January?

This year’s Dry January was not just the annual abstention from alcohol (to counteract excess drinking over the festive season – copyrighted by Alcohol Concern in 2014). It was also pretty dry in terms of new words. Though there was certainly no shortage of notable news items, they tended to… Read More

Are you ‘mabobing’? Read Lucy Mangan’s new article to find out.

I am mabobing as I type this, according to CorrinFoley – making random, fidgety movements (banging my foot against the chair, rapping my fingers on the keys between sentences). It’s because I have so many decisions to make in this column, the first of course being whether to… Read More

Are you ‘kwl’ or ‘cool’? Lucy Mangan looks at your word submissions from the last fortnight

News reaches me – via contributor kaiwaiipanda – that if you are under a certain age, you do not write “cool” in your texts. It is apparently only cool to write “kwl”. I m old, fthr tm. It is possible that they have sound reasons for this otherwise inexcusable… Read More

‘Drynuary’ is nearly over, so what’s next on the word list? Here’s Lucy Mangan with your update…

How are you? Have you survived Dry January? Or ‘Drynuary’, as submitted by Tommy, which if we’d thought of it earlier could have saved us all vital nanoseconds over the last four weeks. When you consider how boring all conversations about dry January are, a nanosecond saved on such discussion… Read More

New Year Etymology Corner – we take a look at the word of the moment, ‘resolution’

‘Resolution’ is one of a group of nouns that come from the Latin word solūtus (meaning ‘made loose’) and are all related to verbs ending in ‘-solve’ (from the Latin solvō, meaning ‘I release’). Other members of this group are ‘dissolution/dissolve’ and ‘absolution/absolve’. They all suggest some sort of release… Read More

Gloving, Basic Income, and Lemmium: December’s Words in the News

As we settle back into our routines with fresh faces and Christmas behind us, we’re bringing some great neologisms into 2016 that December gifted to our linguistic stockings. The adjective nonbinary isn’t exactly new, even when referring to gender (where it indicates a person who identifies as neither female nor… Read More