Posts Tagged: books

  • Jeeves serving Bertie Wooster tea who says Pshaw--I wouldn't say that.

    Pshaw—I didn’t say that

    One of this week’s Wordle (a popular online word gameanswers was PSHAW. It defeated everyone in my WhatsApp group, and my brother confessed he had never heard of it either (but my mother, an ex-English teacher and great reader was surprised he didn’t know). My confident explanation was that it is a “Jeeves word”. That […]

  • Newspaper (THE WEEKLY WORD for word of the week) page with headline THESAURUS TRUCK CRASHES and A truck loaded with thousands of copies of thesauruses crashed yesterday. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralysed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed.

    Thesaurus—storehouse, hoard, treasury …

    A truck loaded with thousands of copies of thesauruses crashed yesterday. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralysed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed. This joke has been doing the rounds of the Internet and whenever I […]

  • Tim Entwisle and Faith Entwisle outside Dymocks in Sydney. Tim is a bibliomaniac.

    Being a bibliomaniac

    The perfect date I started 2025 with the perfect date—my wife and I did a tour of Sydney’s biggest bookshops (Abbeys, Dymocks and Kinokuniya). Why was this so unusual? Is book collecting a sin? I have so many books that my wife usually treats my acquisition of more as a major offence punishable by a […]

  • An image of the Belle Dame Sans Merci with a verse superimposed I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. A shortened version of gloaming, gloam is used in the poem.

    Gloaming in Guernsey and Tasmania

    Gloaming in Guernsey Part of my summer reading over Christmas and New Year (2019-2020) has been The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It is a delightful novel set in the immediate post-war period on the channel island of Guernsey. Although quite a light novel, its plot slowly and cleverly unfolds the tragedies made […]

  • Tim Entwisle with his books—word of the week is tsundoku

    Tsundoku—piling up unread books

    What is a loanword? English is a great pirate language. If it doesn’t have words for something it just raids other languages for them. Called loanwords, English has borrowed thousands of them from nearly all the main languages. English has taken café from French, pyjamas from Hindi, assassin from Arabic, and the list goes on. […]

  • There are so many words for books, pages and other forms of passing on the written word.

    The magic of book

    The Germanic languages spoken in Britain and Northern Europe have magically managed to keep a word for book that refers not to papyrus or parchment but to wood!

  • A compendium contains a compendius amount of information.

    A brief word on COMPENDIOUS

    The meaning of compendious Compendious is a seldom-used adjective reflecting the rarity of what it describes. It describes a piece of writing that is like or of a compendium. A compendium is a comprehensive account containing the substance or essentials of a subject (often an exclusive subject) in a concise or succinct form (especially in book form). It is a list of items or compilation […]