What a glorious thing it is to have Henry V represented on stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty.
The above are the words of the English Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, as quoted in 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which I’m obviously getting a lot of inspiration from. What obviously interested me about that quote was… the Dolphin. Continue reading
Yesterday I shared with you my new favourite word: neck-verse. The first time I typed it, it sounded like an informal term for a group of films all tied together by featuring characters related to a superhero called The Neck.
And sadly, while such a series of films doesn’t (yet) exist, it made me think of the newly-obvious similarity between the words verse and universe. Could there be a link? Continue reading
I saw the word audit recently, and had one of my usual Eureka! moments. Surely, I said to myself, that’s related to the concept of hearing, with its similarity to words like audio, auditory, audience etc. Continue reading
It’s that time again already: it’s next year! It seems like only yesterday that it was last year.
I’d set out my goals for the coming year and so on, but I don’t really do that, not on a yearly basis. I do have one hope for this year though, and that’s that this is the year we finally go back to saying the names of years as though they’re two separate numbers. You know, like ‘twenty-nineteen’ and ‘twenty-twenty.’ Continue reading
Hav you ever read a story that wasn’t told in the past tense? Maybe a few here and there were in the present tense, but it’s safe to assume most short stories or novels you’ve read have been told in the past tense. I was thinking about this today while reading (specifically I think a shift from past simple to past perfect simple to talk about something that happened earlier in the story triggered it).
It’s something that’s true across many languages, and we’re so used to it we don’t really notice. But if you think about it, most stories would work just as well in the present tense. And some writers do use the present tense, for certain sections of their stories at least, to provide a sense of immediacy. So why not use that for the whole story then, and for every story? Continue reading
Yes, before you ask, I did just choose this title because the last post was called Now? Though it’d probably be more logical to have written this one first, as it’d appear below the other post. Ah well, nothing I can do about that now.
Anyway, even if my motivation for choosing this title was rather flippant, looking into it, then is quite an interesting word. Continue reading
A pretty simple word, really, but a couple of months ago I began to think about how nuanced it is. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 