Sublime

Then there are the eggcorns – a term that sprang from an exchange between the linguists Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum about the mishearing of the word ‘acorn’. An eggcorn is a word that is mistakenly substituted for the standard one, but that still sounds logical. We all know about damp squids, but Oxford’s databases now show that trending towa

a bobby (another nickname, based on the name of Sir Robert Peel, the nineteenth-century Home Secretary who created the Metropolitan Police)

I still have some of those early scribblings. Many of them hint at the nerd I was to become.

two firm favourites in the Arsenal manager’s own lexicon: the adverb footballistically (‘footballistically, he’s ready for the first team’), and the adjective handbrakeish (‘I felt we were a little handbrakish today’).

the three lies (they aren’t meals, they aren’t ready, and they definitely aren’t edible).

the proprietor of a mug house or shicker shop, the pub landlord or -lady, is not without his or her own monikers. Among the earliest labels, in the 1500s, were the lick-spigot, ale-draper, and cove-of–the-ken. Today you’re more likely to hear the governor or mine host. In the years in-between, and if you were fond of a tipple, you might have encoun

as Saki once put it, ‘a little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation’,

tribes are versatile code-switchers, able to flick from one tongue to another as the situation demands. The most obvious example of such instinctive skill is there in our local dialects.