jeremy butterfield

National Limerick Day

6th May 2021

There was an old dictionary buff Whose dog snorted mountains of snuff. Himself, so we hear, Preferred to quaff beer, A brew it found frightfully duff. Ah, limericks! The verse form that trips off the tongue like no other. Once particularly popular with rugby teams and the forces, they are the one kind of… Read More

Restore Our Earth

22nd Apr 2021

April 22 is Earth Day and this year’s slogan is ‘Restore Our Earth.’ Earth Day is older than you might suspect. So attuned are we now to environmental anxiety, aka solastalgia, that it’s easy to presume such an ecologically aware event must be a recent institution. Read More

Lockdownversary

23rd Mar 2021

The twenty-third of March marks the anniversary of the first UK lockdown, that fateful Monday evening when the PM announced drastic measures to halt the spread of COVID-19. On social media there is talk of a lockdownversary, a portmanteau word which shows how elastic English is. Read More

World Book Day: read up on the language of books

4th Mar 2021

Thursday marks UK World Book Day. Fifteen million UK primary and secondary pupils will receive a £1 voucher to cash in for a book priced by publishers at a nominal £1. The aim is to encourage reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure is, paradoxically, not pure and simple pleasure. Read More

Word exploration: vaccines, vaccinations and jabs

15th Jan 2021

In what the PM has described as a ‘final sprint’, the new year got off to a flying start with a COVID-19 vaccination rollout underway across the UK. In early January, Her Majesty The Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh were vaccinated. The Palace decided… Read More

New hope for the New Year

28th Dec 2020

New Year’s Eve is traditionally when we fix our gaze firmly forward in hope, having cast a backward glance at the year just ended. Which, despite the negatives, saw a healthy increase in good-neighbourliness and kindness as demonstrated, for instance, by caremongering. I feel hopeful that… Read More

Food for thought this Christmas

21st Dec 2020

I don’t know about you, but I’m already salivating at the prospect of Christmas food. The first pangs start early in December with the nostalgia rush I get upon spotting dinky net bags of mixed nuts for sale. Perhaps folk are deterred by the faff of cracking them open to… Read More

What a coronacoaster of a year!

10th Nov 2020

Over the last several months, when factories, offices, restaurants and other places of social gathering have been (intermittently) shut, people’s creativity has taken all sorts of unexpected directions. Anything goes in the quest to overcome that feeling of blursday, one uneventful day following another so that… Read More

Months of awareness

28th Oct 2020

Last month, this month and the next two are great for practising Latin numerals, as you do: septem, octo, novem, decem (7, 8, 9, 10). But hang on a moment. Decem means ‘ten’, but December isn’t the tenth month. Or is it? Well, it was once, in the original Roman… Read More