In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new treasury of 1,000 Scottish words from Robin A. Crawford
A clishmaclaver is a Scottish word meaning ‘the passing on of idle gossip, sometimes in a book’. A collieshangle denotes a row or fight in which two people bark at each other. Red Biddy is a term for the nasty cocktail of red wine and methylated spirits drunk by the most impoverished of alcoholics. A tatterdemalion is an ill-clad person dressed in rags.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new translation of the classic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstiltskin: these names are among those we meet during our earliest years, with the stories they summon never leaving our psyches. Others are better-known under other titles now, at least in the English-speaking world: Little Red-Cap as Little Red Riding-Hood, Ashypet as Cinderella, Briar-Rose as Sleeping Beauty. But the stories are as familiar.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new lexicon of useful words for troubled times
We live in strange and worrying times. If hindsight, as Billy Wilder once said, is always 20:20, then our own hindsight on 2020 will surely be dominated by widespread unrest, a global pandemic, and that word previous associated more with prisons and areas of lawlessness: ‘lockdown’. There are several words which have come to the fore in 2020, not least the (already outdated-sounding) ‘COVID-19’, to say nothing of the (already exceedingly annoying) ‘new normal’ and (wildly inaccurate) ‘social distancing’. Perhaps word-historians of the future will write whole books on ‘the language of 2020’.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a forty-year-old book debunking various widely held beliefs
Last year, I reviewed a fascinating book, The Dictionary of Misinformation
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads nature poetry from a forgotten poet named Ted
Who is being described? This poet was born in England in the 1930s, married his first wife (of two) in 1956 after falling madly in love, made a name for himself as a nature poet (one notable early poem from his first collection featuring a fox), died in his late 60s, and was called Ted? I’m talking not about Ted Hughes but Ted Walker (1934-2004), one of England’s foremost nature poets of the second half of the twentieth century. And yet while Ted Hughes is one of the most recognisable names in twentieth-century English poetry, his namesake has fallen from view.