English language Category
Children’s singing and chanting games
Peter Opie (1918-82) and his wife Iona (1923-2017) were pioneers of research into and cataloguing of children’s…
Malapropisms and Spoonerisms
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) had Irish lineage and was an MP at Westminster for 32 years, lending…
Roget’s Thesaurus
Stuck for a word? Since 1852 we have been turning to the amazing lexicon (“dictionary, vocabulary, index,…
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’
Being the first English-language novel written specially for children, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) has afforded researchers plenty…
Penguin paperbacks
Bristol-born Sir Allen Lane (1902-70) was the genius with the driving force to create a revolution in…
Michael Bond, creator of ‘Paddington Bear’
The children’s stories about the accident-prone bear called Paddington, were written by Berkshire-born Michael Bond, CBE (1926-2017).…
The versatile ‘ou’
A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken sounds that together make up words (there are 44…
Dylan Thomas
The most famous Welsh poet is surely Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-53), whose most prolific period came in…
Alan Bennett
Author, playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett (1934-), a Yorkshireman, began writing in 1960, when he was a…
Roald Dahl Day
Roald Dahl (1916-90) was born in Cardiff to Norwegian parents and Roald Dahl Day is on his…
Praise and insults
Evidently there are far more British words for insulting people than there are for praising them, probably…
Harold Pinter
Londoner Harold Pinter (1930-2008), writer for stage, screen and print, actor and director, was awarded the 2005…