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Happy Birthday to The Simpsons!

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade and inevitably, when I meet someone new, they end up asking me questions. How and why did I stop eating meat? Do I miss it? Do I cheat? Long ago I stopped telling them the real story (which is dreadfully boring) and started recounting the scene below […]

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One, Two, Three, Alairy…

Girls, in some parts of England and the United States, say, or rather chant, while bouncing a ball: “One, two, three, alairy, four five, six, alairy,” and so on. According to an “eyewitness report,” they say so, while bouncing a ball on the ground, catching it with one hand, keeping the score, and accompanying each alairy with a circular swing of the leg, so as to describe a loop around but not obstruct the rising ball.

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Raining cats and dogs

By Anatoly Liberman

This is an old chestnut. How did ‘Raining Cats and Dogs’ come into being, and stay, in the language? The possibilities are few. A foreign phrase is occasionally repeated verbatim or nearly so, and turns into gibberish. It is possible that the first ‘cats and dogs’ were not even animal names.

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Women’s History Month: Feminism and Art

There is no perfect marriage between feminism (as a political ideology) and art (as a cultural activity). Feminism promises at the same time to enrich the products of art, to expose the pretensions and vested interests in art and to break open the category of art altogether.

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On the fight for English and John Humphrys

In David Crystal’s book ‘The Fight for English’, he assesses the debate over rights and wrongs in English usage. For example, which spelling is correct, ‘anemic’ or ‘anaemic’? Read on to find out! Here, Crystal weighs in on the debate between him and his contemporaries John Humphrys and Lynne Truss.

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