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 […]
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 […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a world tour of the English language courtesy of Paul Anthony Jones’s new book They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but ‘they’, of course are wrong. They’re especially wrong in the case of […]