An Irishman's blog about the English language.
If you enjoyed sipping a word like brandy with Doris Lessing, then get comfortable for a bumper pack of similes and metaphors courtesy of Ross Macdonald and his story collection The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015), edited by Tom Nolan. The book title refers to Macdonald’s protagonist Lew Archer, a private detective in California. […]
It’s a whole year since I made my last book spine poem (aka bookmash), about how swearing is good for you. Emotions run high in this new one too, but there’s no swearing, just birds. Disaffected birds. * The Birds’ Disaffection All the birds, singing In the dream house Out of sheer rage, Birds of […]
If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler. In contemporary literature the one who comes closest is Peter Temple, who, like Chandler, took up the practice in middle age. There’s a lot to be said for it. A late entrant to the fiction-writing […]
Regular readers will be familiar with Strong Language, a group blog about swearing that I co-founded with James Harbeck in 2014. If you’re interested in swearing as a linguistic or cultural phenomenon, I recommend bookmarking or subscribing to it. New posts by our excellent contributors are less frequent now, but that makes it easier to […]
I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet. This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when […]
An open linguistic question was raised recently on Bluesky by Darach Ó Séaghdha: What do we call those cutesie slang phrases that have become productive in the UK lately, like genny lec for ‘general election’ and menty b for ‘mental breakdown’? In response I wrote a short thread, which I already disagree with. So I’ll […]
In Doris Lessing’s story ‘A Road to the Big City’, published in her 1957 collection The Habit of Loving (my Penguin paperback edition, pictured, is from 1960), two young women, sisters, are travelling by train in Johannesburg. Marie, the younger, and Lilla sit at a table with a middle-aged man and allow him to buy […]