Language Lovers

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

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’) and added a small… Read More

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

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

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

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 did quickly dismiss this… Read More

Lucy Mangan is back!

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

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 States. What these… Read More

Lucy Mangan loves your words

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

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

Lucy Mangan on the fortnight’s word submissions

Hello again! And how’ve you been? I am a near-broken woman after London Fashion Week – not that my body, wardrobe and penchant for consuming calories daily will collectively or individually attest to this, because I haven’t been anywhere near the shows. It’s because of the… Read More