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By a slip of the finger I invented a new word this week: thirth. It’s actually spelt 3th, which is what I typed by mistake when I meant to type 13th. I meant to type 13th because April 13th was National Scrabble Day. But that’s by the by.
Last week I shared my excitement at learning that you can make a sentence using only the word ‘buffalo‘ eight times in a row. No sooner had I discovered that revelation than it was trumped by Radio 2 playing I Should Have Known Better by Jim Diamond, in which he proves that you can make a sentence using the word ‘I’ 10 times consecutively.
OLD JOKE ALERT!! What’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison? You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo.
That’s not the only difference, by the way, but I’m not here to talk about the fact that the Americans have been calling their bison by the wrong name for 400 years. I want to share a revelation.
I don’t know if you’ve been watching the Netflix dramatised history series Alexander: The Making of a God, but it seems to have divided audience opinion: those who thought it was really good and those who thought it was really bad (I’m trying to avoid the word Marmite. But there I go.)
This year we should see the construction of a luxury housing development within the iconic gasometer by The Oval cricket ground – the historic grade II listed metal lattice that has looked down not only on countless classic cricket matches but also the first ever football international (England v Scotland, 1870), the first ever FA Cup Final (Wanderers v Royal Engineers, 1872) and the first rugby internationals.
This time last week, Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous groundhog (the world’s only famous groundhog) was emerging from his burrow to make his annual weather prediction. If he sees his shadow, it means there will be another six weeks of winter. If he doesn’t, they’re in for an early spring.
I had my annual appraisal this week. It’s always a rather uncomfortable process when you’re self-employed, and this year it was especially so as I decided to introduce upward appraisals, whereby the employee appraises the boss. What downtrodden lackey wouldn’t jump at such an opportunity to stick it to the man? (more…)
Here’s a story that might have escaped your attention. Back in 2019 a company called Trelleborg Sealing Solutions got together with students at Tewkesbury School to make the world’s longest seamless rubber band. Who said British manufacturing had lost its pioneering spirit?
This is going to really rile my friend Andrew, who’s been trying to persuade me to include hyphenated words and his own pet hate ‘no problem’ for years. I’ve had to point out to him repeatedly that it’s called Word of the Week, not Words of the Week. And yet what is this word ‘climatechange’?
I once won a competition to name a new brand of Japanese food. ‘Fudi’ was my ingenious suggestion, cleverly melding the word ‘food’ with the iconic Japanese mountain in a neat four-letter device that gave the phonetic impression of gastronomic appreciation and could be adapted to either square or linear visual representation. Apparently the new brand was half way to the supermarket shelves when someone pointed out that the name was dangerously similar to the Punjabi word for vagina, so the whole thing had to be scrapped and I was asked to hand back half of my prize money. Like I did it on purpose!
