Newsletter

What’s in the box? 🎁 * I don’t watch Top Gear and know nothing about motorsports, so it’s only natural that the thing of the week is about cars. 🚙 🏎️ * The latest podcast, on language and working out what things mean. 🎙️ * A word from our sponsors. 🍏

What exactly IS the difference between a hare and a rabbit?Portmanteau of the week 🍔 There’s a special kind of linguistic satisfaction (and cheekiness) in kneading together words to see what combinations might be greater than the sum of their parts. It was supposedly Lewis Carroll who first used

Will children who now mostly read time digitally understand “clockwise” and “anticlockwise”?Phrase of the week: Tick tick tick ⏰ I found the quote “Your urgency is not necessarily my urgency” in an old diary list of things I wanted to keep in mind at work. It was to remind myself

That’s ironic When I was a high school English teacher, I was tasked with teaching teenagers how to critique a “text” – to look at some writing and untangle its meaning, plus what techniques an author had used, and why. I enjoyed this part of the job, but it could

Work work work ⏰ Full disclosure, especially for my current colleagues reading this: these days, I am a professional person who can hold a job and do good work. But once upon a time, I was a young person who flitted from gig to gig, never really committing, often unsure of

Masterful plans, carried out by the kids What the films of the eighties seemed to be telling me, as I understood it back then, was that there was no end to the resourcefulness of children. They were full of kids inventing gadgets to foil adult villains, like in The Goonies;