The plans have been made for months, and now the time has finally come: I’m off to Alaska! I’m really looking forward to this trip, not least because my entire family will be together in one (beautiful) place, doing wacky stuff like dog-sleddi…
April is a busy month for philologists, it seems: today is the 177th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language.…
Today is the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Johnson’s dictionary. If you love words and you love history, you have to love Johnson’s dictionary: not only was it one of the first comprehensive dictionaries of the E…
My final term paper has been handed in, and for the first time since I don’t know when, I actually have nothing to do. Well, that’s not strictly true; there’s always something I should be doing. But there’s nothing immediate, nothi…
Hooray, look what I found! It’s that lovely Breton butter that I was swooning over a year ago. I spotted it in the refrigerator case in one of the nice delis in Hove (Bona Foodie, for any interested Brightonians) and I snapped it up immediately, rem…
In just under four weeks, Jeremy and I will be flying to Seattle, where we will get on a small ship with the rest of my family and sail up to Alaska. Some of you old-timers may remember that I did this once before, though, bizarrely, I never wrote about i…