Like many of you out there, I suspect, I'm a rather reluctant user of LinkedIn. The site bills itself as "the world's largest professional network, with hundreds of millions of members" and promises to "connect the world's professionals ... and…
Author Archive
Word of the day: mecca
As you probably know, the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia is of vital importance in Islam. It was the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the site of his first revelations of the Holy Quran. Making a pilgrimage…
Phrase of the day: You wait ages for a bus . . .
London has much to to be proud of, but you'd be hard pushed to find anyone willing to praise the punctuality of our public transport. Whatever else it may be, London is certainly not Tokyo. In Tokyo, if a sign…
Word of the day: bugbear
A bugbear is a pet hate – a small thing that annoys you and that you probably moan about to other people. In less polite terms, we might say that a bugbear is something that gets on your tits (strangely,…
Word of the day: snowflake
London had its first real sprinkling of snow last weekend. It wasn't that exciting, to be honest: a couple of inches fell on Friday night, which is nothing compared to the kind of snow I'm sure many of you get…
Word of the day: crush
It's Valentine's Day today, the one day of the year when married men panic buy the last sad bunches of flowers from garages on their drives home, restaurants double their prices and still end up fully booked weeks in advance,…
Word of the day: zero hours
It's the question every father dreads being asked by their children. "Daddy?" a little voice will ask one day, "what's a zero-hours contract?" You dread this moment for it will signal the beginning of the end: the end of childhood,…
Word of the day: radicalise
If a person is radicalised, something or someone makes them become more radical, more extreme in their political or religious beliefs. Over recent years, when radicalisation – the action or process of causing someone to adopt extremist positions on political…
Phrase of the day: in the wake of
About two minutes' walk from my house in north London is a wonderful Turkish supermarket and bakery called Yasar Halim. There's a chance you may have heard of it, actually, as it once featured in a reading text in New…
Word of the day: pardon
I started teaching English as a Foreign Language back in 1993, and over the years I've learned lots of things from the thousands of students I've been lucky enough to meet. Perhaps the most important thing I've learned is that…