Language Lovers

Lucy Mangan has been confronting her fears in this week’s blog – just don’t ask her for a meeting about it!

27th Aug 2013

In light of the thrice-weekly horror currently being visited upon the nation by newly fungal-faced Jeremy Paxman’s appearances on Newsnight, it behoves us all to thank am_soara for his or her timely submission of ‘pogonophobia’, or ‘fear of beards’. It will give all the… Read More

Lucy Mangan takes on London’s sewer system and confronts her frustration with hobbits

15th Aug 2013

Isn’t it always the way? You wait years for one ‘fatberg’ to come along and then two arrive at once. No sooner had I underlined tikitaka’s contribution for possible inclusion in this week’s post (defined by him/her as ‘a large deposit of sewage underground’)… Read More

Lucy Mangan ponders the worlds of comics, aggresive leapfrogging and erotic-fiction induced pregnancies

18th Jul 2013

D’you know what I love? I love being led to an entirely new (to me) seam of words buried deep in the morphological mines just waiting to be chipped out and carried up to the surface so that I can marvel at them in the bright light of a newly-knowledgeable… Read More

More new words to willantly commonise, brought to you by Lucy Mangan

1st Jul 2013

I think I’d like to commonise ‘commonise’, a submission from slartibartfast. Why? Well, partly because you already pretty much understand what I’m talking about, don’t you? Making something common to two or more parties – spreading the word in but a single word. It… Read More

Lucy Mangan takes on panda worship, imaginary children, and the apocalypse – all of which should be expected when looking at the latest new word submissions

24th May 2013

I don’t know if it speaks to my lack of imagination, education or religious inclination that my first thought on seeing Knuj’s submission, ‘pandeism’ was that it denoted a small – and ideally growing – cult that worships pandas. In my defence, I… Read More

Lucy Mangan is back!

7th May 2013

When I was first offered this blog job – hang on, that sounds bad; let’s call it blog position – I leapt at it. Little did I know how perilous it would turn out to be. Before I started here, I was blissfully unaware of the number of words there… Read More

Divided by a Common Language

2nd Apr 2013

Two expressions submitted to the website caught my eye for the same reason recently. One of these was the adjective ‘kick-arse’, submitted by an Australian user, and the other was the idiomatic phrase ‘preach to the choir’, submitted by a user in the United… Read More

Lucy Mangan loves your words

8th Mar 2013

Well, hello again! And how’ve you been? I was fine until I heard someone on Radio 4 not only use the word ‘productise’ but do so without reproach, rebuke or reprimand from his interlocutor, or the Director General of the BBC immediately shutting down transmission and promising immediate repayment of… Read More

Thinking Outside the Dictionary

1st Mar 2013

A user of this website recently left a comment asking why we had chosen to mark as ‘rejected’ a word that another user had submitted. After all, the word had been invented and used by that person, so surely it should be included in the… Read More