Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I can do some of the number puzzles.
I'm an Arsenal fan and an even bigger Arsene fan.
Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.
The best time to catch tribal jargon is when it's not looking.
For the Anglo-Saxons, food determined a person's position in society.
The notion of 'Queen's English' is usually applied to our pronunciation.
I was fascinated by the shape of words even before I knew what they meant.
I'm not a brazen extrovert, but I'm not as blushing or demure as people might think.
I'm a work in progress. I've started doing spin classes, which always clears my head.
From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.
If we want to change the nuance of a particular word we have to change that ourselves.
I love both garlic and onions, and this word pithily captures the rich tastes of both.
Probably my favourite winter-word of all. Apricity is the warmth of the sun on a chilly day.
No one expects the tone of an election to be mild-mannered, least of all a presidential one.
In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.
Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.
Friable isn't often used of food, yet its meaning lends itself perfectly to pastry and crumbly biscuits.
English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.
The character of our language defines us, and dictionaries say as much about us as about the way we speak.
I don't intentionally eavesdrop. I'm not looking for salacious gossip, I'm just looking for vocabulary items.
Why use salty when you can have brackish? It carries a sense of part-water, part-salt, too, just like the sea.
I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.
Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.
If a term becomes too popular, its irritant value is ramped up. The impulse is then to replace it with something else.
I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.
Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.
Glogg is a Scandinavian mulled wine, sweetened with honey, almonds, raisins and spices. Its name suits its purpose so beautifully.
Booze' was once a popular term in the slang or 'cant' of the criminal underworld, which may explain its rebellious overtones today.
Claggy is often seen as a negative word, yet for me it describes perfectly that full-mouthed feel of a treacle tart of banoffee pie.
The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.
As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?
Every sport, every profession, every group united by a single passion draws on a lexicon that is uniquely theirs, and theirs for a reason.
One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.
The enduring image I will keep of Jane Goodall is of her emotional goodbye to a chimp she had rescued and nurtured, on the day of the animal's release.
Above all, Jane Goodall continues to teach us that, as humans, we are no more entitled to our glorious planet than the chimps she so lovingly protects.
I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.
I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.
In all my years in 'Countdown's' Dictionary Corner, the subject most guaranteed to rankle with our viewers is the presence of Americanisms in the dictionary.
When I was growing up, I worried that people would dismiss me as a boring swot because I always had my nose in a vocabulary book - usually in French or German.
Among the best of Hitchcock's own psychological thrillers is 'Spellbound,' whose story unusually wrapped the subject of psychoanalysis around a murder mystery.
There is an art to eavesdropping, but I think to some extent we are all guilty of picking up those little odds and ends that can be quite intriguing if you analyse them.
New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.
I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.
When eyeliner was introduced in the Twenties by Max Factor, a pioneer of Hollywood film cosmetics who began selling to the public, even the word 'makeup' was a revelation.
As dialect began to be collected in the late 19th century, such words as Yorkshire's 'gobslotch' emerged, revealing the burgeoning association between gluttony and stupidity.
Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their rides of suspense give a good thrill, but it's rarely a comfortable one.
New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?
The term 'psychological thriller' is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores motivations while keeping blood and chainsaws to a minimum.
The earliest dictionaries were collections of criminal slang, swapped amongst ne'er-do-wells as a means of evading the authorities or indeed any outsider who might threaten the trade.
Almost half the adult population finds discussing the subject of money difficult. Slang words help us to navigate these conversations by making us feel more comfortable and confident.