Sublime

before you find yourself on a dash spree, remember: less Morse code, more English.

slopjockey: the chef.

the American humorist Erma Bombeck, who once professed: ‘I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.’

percussive maintenance: hitting something in order to mend it.

Journalism, according to G.K. Chesterton in the 1920s, ‘largely consists in saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive’.

Sir Thomas Beecham would have agreed. His verdict on the art became notorious: ‘Try everything once, except incest and Morris dancing.’

if a male golfer hits a rather short ‘girlie’ putt or moves it only a few yards up the fairway, you might hear his male opponent ask, ‘Does your husband play golf?’

no

common to all is the most singular characteristic of the new spoken-written language of social media: brevity. This is a land where vowels are dropped, phrases condensed to acronyms, sounds reduced to numbers, and most punctuation forgotten.