In this special guest post, Caroline Taggart offers some little-known facts about punctuation marks, to mark the publication of her new book, The Accidental Apostrophe: … And Other Misadventures in Punctuation Did you know 1. The Victorians were crazy about hyphens? Jane Austen’s nephew Edward Austen Leigh, composing a biography of […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones I love books of language trivia, and learning new words is always a pleasure. One of the finest Twitter accounts to offer a ‘word of the day’ is @HaggardHawks, […]
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle delves into the life of the man immortalised by the spoonerism Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) was a physically striking man. An albino with pink skin and white hair, he became affectionately known as the Child by students at New College, […]
How did the famous trilby hat get its name? Here’s a question for you: what was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era? And who wrote it – Dickens perhaps? George Eliot? Robert Louis Stevenson? It was none of these, though they all enjoyed huge sales. Instead, the accolade arguably […]
Interesting words related to literature and reading We love to collect interesting words, especially those related to literature, reading, and other such things. Indeed, since the stuff of literature is words, we love to delve into the wonderful world of the lexical. Here are ten of the best literary words […]