Posts Tagged ‘cricket’
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 30, 2011
‘What’s your English? 2011’ will be moving on this week, from sport to metaphor and figurative language. But – as many of our sports-related posts demonstrate – there’s a strong link between the two themes. Stan Carey’s piece this week celebrates the wonderfully original similes dreamed up by sports commentator Ray Hudson. Meanwhile, Andrew Delahunty [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 29, 2009
Which is the more difficult word: take or encephalomyelitis? Most people would pick the second one – but a lexicographer wouldn’t. For dictionary-writers, words like encephalomyelitis are easy because they only have one meaning, and it can be defined with complete accuracy. The really difficult words are go, take, get, and similar high-frequency items which [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 02, 2009
First, a little history to set the scene. We think of cricket as a very ‘English’ game, and nowadays it’s mainly played in parts of the former British empire: Australasia, the Indian subcontinent, South Africa, and the Caribbean. But its history is more complex. In a recent novel, Netherland, the protagonist is a Wall Street [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on March 25, 2009
Scarcely a day goes by without Robert Peston, the BBC Business Editor, telling us of yet another eye-watering sum of money being allocated by government to a failing bank, or an eye-watering loss sustained by a major corporation. Here he is on his blog on 5th January this year: And we can be fairly confident [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 24, 2009
Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – [...]
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