Welcome back, everyone! Children are the most inventive users of language on the planet, and we rarely give them credit for it. They coin words, they turn nouns into verbs, they narrate their own games aloud in the third person. A playground is, among other things, a laboratory of language […]

Welcome back, all! In an age of texts that vanish the moment they’re read, there is something almost unbearably weighty about a letter. We still say things are true “on paper”; we “put it in writing” when we really mean it. A letter is a voice that has been slowed […]

Welcome back, everyone! English borrows an extraordinary amount from water when it wants to describe how we feel. We are “adrift”, “all at sea”, “out of our depth”; we “go with the flow”, we feel “flooded”, we “sink or swim”. Water is our favourite metaphor for the parts of life […]