Newsletter

What’s in the box? * New post on stubbornness, clarity and glasses frames 👓 * Frame of the week – the optimal eyewear 🥸 * Mysteries of what people like – the top posts, as voted by your eyeballs 👁️ * So close to a centenary update for members – help needed 🙏 * The immortality of newsletters and email 📧

What’s in the box? 📦 * Real quick – some responses to newsletter #25 💛 * The first post of a new series – notes from a small house 🏠 * Square metreage of the week – how small is a small house? 📏 * A new exclusive post, plus an opportunity to get Christmas early 🎄

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