By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I was in north Wales last week, having a little holiday, when I stumbled upon a book in a Caernarfon charity shop that I should really already have owned. Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage was first published in 1947 but much of Partridge’s advice about good English still holds good today, and deserves its place beside the Brothers Fowlers’ The King’s English on the shelves of any grammatical stickler and pedant.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Which word is being described here? Ultimately inspired by a play (a comedy) by a well-known playwright whose surname begins with S, the word was derived from the name of a comic character in that play who often uses the wrong word to describe something, with ludicrous results. This word first turns up in print (according to the OED) in the 1830s, although the play which inspired the word was written some time before that.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I’m fond of debunking widely believed but factually erroneous ‘truths’ about literature. It’s one reason I began this blog, some years ago when I still had my youthful bad looks. There’s a wonderful word for such truths-that-turn-out-to-be-not-so-true, and it was coined by Norman Mailer in his biography of Marilyn Monroe. It is the word factoid.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The joy of reading an O. Henry story largely resides in the fun of trying to guess the twist in the tale before the end. No other writer of short stories made the plot twist such an integral part of his art, and he kept this up over numerous stories. The big, fat, cheap collection of 100 of his short stories which I own is only a ‘selected’ stories: he wrote many more.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Songs about the open road have been around since … well, at least since Walt Whitman wrote his ‘Song of the Open Road’ in 1856. In popular music, too, songs in praise of cars, roads, driving, and the power and speed of automotive engineering have a pretty considerable pedigree.
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