Books and Words

The Righteous Mind

Thursday, 17 May 2012

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion wouldn’t be everyone’s choice of holiday reading, but it somehow felt appropriate as I sat in the Las Vegas sunshine in presidential election year. Whenever politics was discussed, even among friends, views were clearly polarized between liberal and conservative. Not to mention those [...]

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The Ill-gotten Gotten

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

There can be quite a lot of snobbery around the English language, especially when it comes to words that are considered ‘incorrect usage’. I must admit that I can be one of those snobs myself, although I tend towards the moderate end of the scale. The main culprit behind such snobbery is Henry Watson Fowler [...]

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Hands up! This is a sustain!

Tuesday, 27 March 2012

What does the word ‘sustainability’ mean to you? It’s one that crops up pretty much everywhere these days to the extent that its meaning has been forgotten. It’s become a cliché. I should say at the start that this thought wasn’t prompted by Roger’s comment yesterday, but by the new planning reforms issued by the [...]

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J is for Jerome K Jerome

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

This is my contribution to ABC Wednesday and for Round Ten I am focusing on people from the past, some famous, others less so. Although I love my gadgets, one of the most popular that I’ve avoided so far is the Kindle. My problem with it is that although one might store a library within [...]

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You, Yourself, Argh!

Friday, 16 March 2012

What is it about government euphemistically named helplines that has me pulling out what is left of my hair? I had reason to get in touch with a neighbouring local authority today to pay a £25 parking fine that our son had thoughtlessly picked up on Mrs P’s behalf.

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The Etymologicon

Thursday, 8 March 2012

Don’t you just love serendipity (from Serendip, the old name for Sri Lanka) especially when you stumble upon a book you really enjoy. So it was with The Etymologicon which I came across when browsing the shelves of Waterstones while I was waiting to meet my son last week. It describes itself as: ‘a circular [...]

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Call Me Madame

Saturday, 25 February 2012

A word to the wise. If you’re planning to visit to France any time in the near future, be careful not to refer to any young ladies, or old ones for that matter, as Mademoiselle – it’s been banned. I’m sure that Mademoiselle will be missed (geddit?), but the equivalent of Miss has been deemed [...]

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Alpha Course

Monday, 6 February 2012

I am occasionally pulled up on the spelling errors and typos that crop up in Shooting Parrots and that is how it should be. If it wasn’t for the metaphorical blue pencil, where would the language be? And because I’m prone to a gaffe or two myself, I’m loath to point the grammatical finger, but [...]

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Furthermore

Friday, 27 January 2012

I like to think that I’m not too much of a language snob, but suspect that I am really. I certainly feel my hackles rise when words are used incorrectly, but especially by people who should know better. I was in our local supermarket this morning and decided to browse the paperbacks, picking up The [...]

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