Crisis comes from a Greek word that also gives us critical and critic
By Dot Wordsworth
In recent years the polite convention has been to talk about mental health. Sometimes it seems that broadcasters speak of little else
By Dot Wordsworth
It was not until the 1980s that the catcall escaped from the theater to the street
By Dot Wordsworth
It’s useful to have a name ready when the family asks at dinner: “What’s this?”
By Dot Wordsworth
Nice, as in ‘a nice cup of tea,’ was a word loathed by my schoolmistresses
By Dot Wordsworth
We never used to use the term in speech
By Dot Wordsworth
Suicide clubs, sexploiters and political idealists use common methods to evade the censors in a world of spies and algorithms
By Dot Wordsworth
I dislike postmodernist architecture and big business being beastly to workers, but late capitalism seems to me quite a feeble cliché
By Dot Wordsworth
The hash has grown in importance since 2007 when Twitter introduced the hashtag
By Dot Wordsworth
To own occupies a semantic field which turns out to be a Grimpen Mire
By Dot Wordsworth
No one ordinarily talks of the festive season
By Dot Wordsworth
If wicca rings a bell it is because of a sensational intervention into language history
By Dot Wordsworth
A surd number or quantity is irrational, such as the square root of two
By Dot Wordsworth
