It’s a common myth, often disputed, that the Inuit have many more words for snow than in English, and Bill Bryson, in his At Home: A Short History of Private Life tells us that in South America, there are many hundreds of potato-related words. English is widely accepted to…
Category: words
“Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.” Adam Lindsay Gordon A wild night left lots of algal debris and wind-whipped seafoam on the beach at Lyme. I’d actually gone to see if there was a good sunrise…
Several wild windy days have started shaking apples from our two trees, which is good news for wasps, ants and small rodents, but less so for us. I’ve just started picking now – the Egremont Russets are starting to come away from the twigs fairly easily. This means…
Taken as I did my daily walk before tackling the weekly shop in Seaton, “limpid” was the word that immediately sprang to mind as I gazed at the calm blue sea. The sea is often clearer here than at Lyme as there is less sediment from the cliffs,…
I like to think that I have a pretty extensive English vocabulary, but all that time at home in lockdown wondering what new to write about the Coronavirus must have sent journalists to their online thesauruses (thesauri?) for a bit of variety. Today, I came across two words…
“Daisies are our silver, Buttercups our gold: This is all the treasure We can have or hold.” Thus runs a children’s hymn I remember from Sunday School in the 50s and early 60s. Innocent and charming, it was written by Jan Struther, to be sung to the tune…
Early this morning, the alarm woke me from sleep to see the last complete lunar eclipse visible from the UK for about 10 years. When I first looked up at about 4:15, slightly less than half of the moon’s face was bright, and the rest a dull mark…
…. one of those words you hardly ever need, but when you do, you do. It is the smell of wet earth after rain – not usually noteworthy in our damp Atlantic climate here in Devon, but after weeks of parching sun and wind, we now have a…
Every so often, I come across the remains of a buzzard kill. The edge of our stream seems to be a favoured spot. We have a pair of buzzards who nest locally, and their favourite prey seems to be the wood pigeon. I’ve heard the chick(s) calling for…