In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the history and original meaning of a now ubiquitous word Here’s a pub quiz question for you: in which century were the words ‘computer’ and ‘electricity’ first used in English writing? The twentieth? ‘Computer’ may lead us to […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the eighteenth-century origins of nonsense literature When did the tradition of English nonsense literature arise? Who invented nonsense literature? Although Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear are the names that immediately spring to mind, several eighteenth-century writers should get […]
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 […]
Ten surprising stories and histories surrounding the language of the modern world This week we’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, a review copy of Caroline Taggart’s book New Words for Old: Recycling Our Language for the Modern World. The book takes a look at supposedly ‘modern’ or contemporary words and […]
The curious origins behind one of Britain’s favourite words – and its link to Gothic fiction Word origins, as demonstrated by the popularity of bestselling books like Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, make fascinating reading. But ‘serendipity’ has a particularly interesting origin-story. The […]