(Source: booksandquills.blogspot.co.uk)
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Mark Forsyth's The Horologicon gives you the most extraordinary words in the English language, arranged according to the hour of the day when you really need them. Available now.
Are you a theist (one who is addicted to tea) or partial to a bit of shturmovschina (the practice of working frantically just before a deadline, having not done anything for the last month)?
Join our campaign to bring back these wonderful lost words of the English Language! #lostwords
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Young people these days are exposed to an almost constant stream of the written word… When I was a lad, in the 1980s, we communicated by phone and watched television. I never wrote a single word to anybody of my own age, except perhaps to pass notes in class… But the internet and the mobile phone have changed all that – despite what you might believe if you read certain newspaper columnists who fulminate against the effects of technology on the written world.
Mark Forsyth, author of The Horologicon, The Sunday Times, October 2012.
It is the amell, which is to say the hour between one and two o’clock, when all right-thinking creatures rush joyously from their labours to lunch. You hardly need a clock to know that this grand hour is at hand, as your own belly will chime with impatient borborygmi, the rumbling noises produced by an empty stomach.
HG Wells once wrote that: “…elephant hunters say they can tell the proximity of a herd by the borborygmic noises the poor brutes emit, and Glasfurd describes a tiger’s life as an alternation of uncomfortable hunger and uncomfortable repletion.”
Better, as the saying goes, to live one day as an uncomfortable tiger than a hundred years as a borborygmic elephant. Humans are famelicose (constantly hungry) creatures. And so to lunch!
Mark Forsyth, author of The Horologicon - Skinks, swanks and butter shags: Mark Forsyth serves up a feast of wonderful words, Radio Times
(Source: booksandquills.blogspot.co.uk)
Crimewatch is a splendid place to watch the demise of the English language. The police are never looking for people, only for individuals. ‘We are trying to locate three individuals…’ As opposed, of course, to composite beings. If the sex of the individual is known, they become a male or a female; but never, perish the thought, a man or woman. Men don’t commit crimes, males do. These individuals do not walk or run or drive or skip or any of the things that mere people might do. They proceed. Sometimes they proceed on foot. Sometimes they proceed in an easterly direction. They were never seen, only sighted. All of them are trying to make good their escape. That’s why the police are appealing to members of the public. Who, in the name of all that’s pleonastic, is not a member of the public?
Why do people talk nonsense in public, Mark Forsyth, Spectator
There has probably never been a time in history when writing was so universal and so important. Universal literacy began only with the educational reforms of the late 19th century… The tiling patterns of the London Underground stations are there because it was assumed that most passengers would be illiterate and able to identify their stop only by colour.
Mark Forsyth, author of The Horologicon, The Sunday Times, October 2012.
(Source: booksandquills.blogspot.co.uk)
Glancing round the internet you can find examples of terrible English, but you’ll also find an astonishing number of corrections. The comments beneath a YouTube video are almost certain to contain a “your” instead of “you’re”, but also somebody pointing out the mistake. These people are known as grammar Nazis, a phrase of which there is no record before 1999. Why would there be? That was the golden age of the written word.
Mark Forsyth, author of The Horologicon, The Sunday Times, October 2012.
