Jonathon Green - visit his website here - is the English language's leading lexicographer of slang. His Green's Dictionary of Slang is quite simply the most comprehensive and authorative work on slang ever published. Today, Jonathon looks at the many and various ways that townies in Britain and America insult their rural cousins... Peasant. Simple word. Comes ... Read More...
Month: January 2011
[The story so far… Ed Balls is determined to 'squash' his rival Ed Milliband; Boris Johnson's Latvian Nanny is on the trail of the Black Rabbit; Art Garfunkel and Elton John have been plagiarising Alain de Botton's Tweets; and Rod Lidl, attempting to rescue elusive poet Grayson Ellis from a ... Read More...
Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is? must be one of the strangest hit records ever made. Dan Daniels, Guy Lombardo and Tony Bennett all released versions of it, but none managed to match the success of Lee’s recording, which features orchestral arrangement by Randy Newman. Released in 1969, it was ... Read More...
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Ben Kay is a seriously talented chap. Not content with being an award-winning advertising creative and proprietor of a highly respected industry blog , he decided to turn his skills and his spare time to creating a high-octane blockbuster novel. The result, Instinct, an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller about deadly mutant ... Read More...
Jonathon Law's more or less got it, and Steve Buckley's given us the best guesses since Stan Madeley's efforts. For anyone wanting to be put out of their misery, click continue. 8083 ... Read More...
Nige poses this week's fiendish Round Blogworld Quiz question (see the previous ones and their solutions here). As usual, find the link between these cryptic clues. A point for each item you get, and an imaginary cream bun if you get them all. Here's the question then: What links a playwright who broke ... Read More...
James Hamilton continues his 'The Football Fan Delusion' series by exposing the working class myth of Professionalism... Most of the current fan myths about British football are of fairly recent origin, but versions of this one have been circulating since the Edwardian era: that the coming of professionalism marked a terrific ... Read More...
I was sorry to hear of the death of John Gross. His Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters is one of my favourite books and has been since I was a teenager. We were living in humid Hamilton, New Zealand, a city that was growing fast with wide sticky roads ... Read More...
Judith Flanders' new book, The Invention of Murder (HarperCollins) takes a fascinating look at Victorian society through the prism of its obession with murder: the real-life cases where every gruesome detail is relished by a bloodthirsty press; and the ubiquity of murder in novels, plays and Victorian culture generally. The book has earned ... Read More...
