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 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, […]
Words that used to mean something very different We’ll own up right at the start: the ten words below were suggested to us by the latest book we’ve been reading, Paul Anthony Jones’s The Accidental Dictionary: The Remarkable Twists and Turns of English Words. Jones’s previous books – one of […]
15 neologisms and coinages to describe as yet unnamed experiences in the modern world Here at Interesting Literature Towers we love interesting word facts. On Twitter we recently held a competition to coin a new word for something that doesn’t really have an existing word to describe it. (We’ve tried […]
The true origins of some modern additions to the Oxford English Dictionary and other ‘new’ words This post is a sort of sequel to our earlier post, about 10 seemingly modern words which actually have older, literary connections. In that post, we cast an eye over words such as ’email’ […]