Snoreathon
The first time I came across the word ‘snoreathon’, I fell about laughing. It’s so amusing and evocative. How was the match / the movie / your date? A total snoreathon. You glue a bit of ancient Greek place name to an onomatopoeic middle English verb and you got it: mind-deadening please-make-it-stop tedium beyond endurance. […]
Think-tank
Don’t you just love this word? I do. It’s one my totally favourite expressions, one of those matches made in heaven where two words that rhyme or alliterate or have assonance come together effortlessly to make one snappy, humorous, graphic expression. The dictionary says that a think-tank is a research institute. But I see this […]
Pop Until You Drop
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It was 1995, and I’d just started my new job writing SpeakUp Movies: booklets designed to make original-version commercial movies comprehensible to Spanish-speaking students of English. A large part of the work involved writing an English-Spanish glossary to the screenplay. This glossary was to include notes on anything that we thought needed explanation or clarification: […]
Flipchart
I needed a flipchart (back in the dark days before I had a smartphone). And I could not for the life of me remember how to say it in Spanish or Catalan. Actually, I don’t think I ever knew. The dictionary turned up ‘rotafolio’ which I’d never heard before, and nor had the people in […]