David Crystal, Author at Catholic Herald

David Crystal

November 23, 2020

What impresses David Crystal most about the modern use of happy is the remarkable range of settings in which it is used.

Daycations and saycations: What the pandemic has done to an old word

October 16, 2020

I’m struck by the way this word has caught on in new guises. It’s a very old word: Chaucer used it, as did Shakespeare; and it became routinely used for any formal break from an activity, such as between university terms. It developed the general meaning of “holiday” in American English during the 19th century,

Word of the month: The letter ‘e’

September 21, 2020

A word? Well, it was voted “word of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 1998, because it was becoming increasingly used in such expressions as email and e-business – “e” being short for electronic. But for most of us, e is just a letter – though in English an especially interesting one. I’m

‘Thou shalt commit adultery’: The accidental genius of typos

August 21, 2020

Typo was originally a short form of typographer – that is, a printer. Its first known use is 1816, but by the end of the century it had come to have its present-day meaning: a typographical error. Of course it leaves open the question of whether an error is inadvertent or deliberate. I choose this

From quarantedium to elbumps: the new wave of linguistic blends

July 22, 2020

What day of the week is it? For many, during lockdown, this question proved extraordinarily difficult to answer. Days seemed to merge into each other. We needed new vocabulary to describe such novel experiences. Hence, Blursday. Blursday is what in linguistics is called a blend. Two words combine to create a new word. It’s a

Will strexit make you Whexit? The unexpected rise of a new suffix

June 19, 2020

If you had said to me, a decade ago, that in the next 10 years we were going to see a new suffix arrive in the English language, I would have said “Don’t be silly!” Suffixes – word-endings such as in goodness, movement, wonderful – don’t develop very often. Many have been in the language

Phrase of the month: Social distancing

May 15, 2020

Every year the big English dictionaries announce a “word of the year” – a word that has seen a major increase in its frequency of use, or which captures a dominant mood. A couple of years ago, most of them went for Brexit. Last year, Cambridge Dictionaries chose upcycling; Oxford chose a phrase – climate

In the cause of God’s vagabond

August 18, 2016

‘You’ve been hacked.” It’s the message no internet user wants to hear. In my case, the message came at the end of February this year from French spiritual writer Didier Rance, who wanted to check a reference on the John Bradburne poetry website. He typed in www.johnbradburnepoems.com, as I’ve done thousands of times over the

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