Q. What are some of the euphemisms that polite – or seemingly polite – society have used to describe love (or lust) making over the centuries? . A. . Amorous congress . Basket-making . Behind door work . A bit of summer cabbage . Blanket hornpipe . Boil the cabbage

Q. In his 1653 Complete Herbal, botanist Nicholas Culpeper wrote: ‘the decoction of the thistle in wine being drank, expels superfluous melancholy out of the body, and makes a man as merry as a cricket.’ ‘As merry as a cricket’. That’s not something one hears much in 2022. What are

Q. What are some English idioms that reflect the hope that things just have to get better… at some point.   A. Due for a purple patch A purple patch is a sustained period of good luck and serious success. The expression stems back to Imperial Rome, where only emperors

Q. Pugs have played an outsized role in fiction. Jane Austen brings us Mansfield Park’s Lady Bertram who would rather spend time with her pug than her children. ‘To the education of her daughters Lady Bertram paid not the smallest attention. She had not time for such cares. She was

Q. What are some forgotten or little used words related to eating or drinking? . A. Bags O’ Mystery Sausages. Nuff said Bellytimber Food Bever A snack Bibulous Related to or a fancy for alcoholic drinks Bouffage A spectacular feast Carousal A crazed party with much drinking Cibarious Food-related Collation

Q. What is it about we English and our food-based insults? . A. ‘Truly, thou art damned like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.’ Shakespearean characters, like Court Jester Touchstone in As You Like It, excel in the art of food-based insult. ‘His brain,’ Jaques declares in Act 2

Q. ‘Un’ words can seem unforgivably lazy. First, we invent a treasure cave of words. Then, we just slap ‘un’ on a bunch of them and claim the opposite meaning. Voila! Forgiving. Unforgiving. Grateful. Ungrateful. But, un words can also be unabashedly harsh. What are some of the most unencouraging

Q. We’ve been waiting on them for centuries now, but what exactly are tenterhooks? . A. Thankfully, they are not as grisly as one might imagine. For those who haven’t heard the phrase, being ‘on tenterhooks’ means that you’re on edge, nervous, waiting painfully to find something out, or to

Q. What are some lesser used words that describe archrivals or opponents? . A. In thinking about archrivals, we can start with the all-out despising, fight to the floor types we find in fiction: Holmes v. Moriarty, The Avengers v. Thanos, Harry Potter v. Voldemort, Jets v. Sharks. Then there

Q. As we emerge from hiding – some inch by inch, some with rocket boosters – many are thinking about how they might live their lives differently moving forward. As Nina Simone, then Michael Bublé sang: ‘It’s a new dawn, It’s a new day, It’s a new life for me…’