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Apparently today is National Thesaurus Day. You’d think they could have come up with a better name for it. According to NationalDayCalendar.com, NTD is celebrated every year on 18th January. Really? Since when? By who? And how? Is there a Synonym Society somewhere who spend the day running around shouting euphemisms at one another? My God, I bet there is!
In fact, I think I’ve just defined Parliament.
Where would we be without balls? England would never have won the World Cup. (I’m trying to ignore your tittering). Cinderella would never have met Prince Charming. And, on the grander scale, Christopher Columbus would have sailed off the edge of the Earth. From atoms and molecules to planets and stars, everything tends towards the spherical. Even time. No really. It’s no accident that history repeats itself.
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So the Chinese have landed a space craft on the Dark Side of the Moon. I was never a fan of prog rock myself, but that seems a bit over the top. Ah, please yourselves. This week’s space exploration news, coming 50 years after Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’, has raised several questions about our natural satellite, the first being why has it take so long for mankind to find our way to the other side?
Are you hanging up your stocking on the wall?
Are you stocking up in case we crash out of the EU with no deal at aaaall?
Are you wondering if the two words
Are connected in some way?
Are you asking yourself whether, had they gone with these lyrics, it would have been such a perennial Christmas hit for Slaaaaaade?
So here it is Merry Christmas everybody’s having fun…
Before I move on to verse two, let me clear up the stocking question. It begins, as most things do, with football.
A few weeks ago the Word of the Week was Bugbear, which naturally led on to an investigation of bears. I’ve always regarded the investigation of bears as something that’s best done from the other side of a TV screen, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that they’re planning on releasing a bunch of brown bears into the woods just down the road near Bristol. (more…)
We keep hearing worrying predictions about the death of the high street. I’m very fond of high streets, so on Black Friday I decided to do my bit, bunk off writing Word of the Week and go to a high street to do some shopping. (more…)
Is there a more rock’n’roll word than alright? That’s a rhetorical question. Don’t bother answering. I’ve done the research and the answer’s no. There are other rock’n’roll words, like ‘hey’ and ‘ok’ and ‘Serengeti’ (I’m joking, Toto fans), but nothing comes close to ‘alright’.
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Such is the absurdity of war that although the 1918 Armistice was signed and sealed by half past five in the morning, the guns kept firing until they were officially told to stop at 11am. The number of casualties on all sides in that final five-and-a-half-hour flurry is estimated at 11,000. What is it about 11s?
The big news this week is that scientists can accurately track whales using images from satellites 300 odd miles above the surface of the sea. This is great news for people who like to track whales, but it didn’t go down well with Rob, the aforementioned James Acaster fan. “So we’ve got CCTV cameras that can’t give a clear picture of someone robbing a cashpoint five yards away but they can identify a whale from Space!” (more…)
The genie is out of the bottle. 118 words in and for the first time we have a word that could be deemed ‘a bit rude’. Yes, we’ve had sausage. Yes, we’ve had pencil. But I’m not talking schoolboy euphemisms here, I’m talking about a word that you might well hear eminent medics use (when they’re not out drinking) to describe the male genital appendage. (more…)