Recently my colleague John “Jokie” Jokeson came over to brainstorm ideas for a short comedy film he is hoping to produce. It went like this: Shorten Humourless (SH): Hi Jokie, what’s new? JJ: Good to see you...
Category - Words and writing
Surely now is the time to call for equal rights for all the different typefaces of the world. Fonts have feelings too, whether they are full blooded serifs, shy little sans serifs, script fonts that can only mimic a handwritten...
“Marie Kondo your fridge” the headline urged.* As you probably know, Marie Kondo is the tidiness and decluttering queen. Who doesn’t like her concept of “tidying up in a way that will spark joy in your life and change it...
When Isaac Newton was a mathematics student at Cambridge in 1665, the University closed its doors. This may have been due to the neighbours complaining about the raucous, high pitched sounds coming from the King’s College...
I loved my primary school library collection of Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” stories written in the 1920s to 1960s. William’s adventures were set in a well-off English village, which was close enough to London for...
Don’t you just love clickbait headlines in online media? Clickbait story titles ask a question or state a fact or attitude that prods your curiosity or stokes your outrage. It bothers you so much that you just...
“There there” said the doting mother to her six year old son who had fallen over and cracked the screen of his phone for the third time in four weeks. “What’s the lesson we’ve learnt this month from all this...
“I beg to submit the following solutions of your (the Poet’s) chief difficulties. Topic 1. You frequently asked where are the friends of your childhood and urge that they should be brought back to you. As far as I am able...
We all use, abuse and confuse abbreviations. Ironically, “abbreviation”, meaning the shortened form of a word or phrase, is itself quite a long word of six syllables. Count them if you don’t believe...