Botox Brandy Bubble wrap Champagne Chewing gum Chocolate Chip Cookies Coca Cola Cornflakes Dry cleaning Dynamite Fireworks Ice cream cones Ink-jet printers LSD Matches Microwave ovens Pacemakera Pap smears Penicillin Popsicles Post-It notes Potato Chips/Crisps Potato Crisps… Read More ›
Culture
Many Happy Returns
These days it is more common for people to say ‘Happy Birthday‘, but you still sometimes hear ‘Many Happy Returns’. A student asked me the other day what this phrase meant, as it is not obvious to foreign speakers. The… Read More ›
Aren’t these like…I don’t know.. hankies?
My father and all my uncles used to use hankies. Every Christmas, a very popular gift was a pack of hankies with his initial on. My mother used to wash my dad’s hankies by putting them in a pot of… Read More ›
Did you know?
Pink was originally a colour for boys and blue was originally a colour for girls. Pink was seen as a version of red, a very masculine colour. And blue was a colour associated with icons of the Virgin Mary… Read More ›
The Queen’s Gambit
I watched the Queen’s Gambit the day before The Crown came out. My husband was away for work, it was pouring with rain and I had a cold, so I was looking for something to watch. It was number 1… Read More ›
Bet they are eating their words now…
Everything that can be invented has been invented. Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office, in 1899. I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Thomas J. Watson Snr, IBM chairman, 1943. Computers in the future may… Read More ›
The entitlement is staggering
Posted by a successful screenwriter as a message sent to him on LinkedIn. The automatically suggested answers say it all! and another one….who sounds about 14
Fun facts
When you were born, for a tiny amount of time, you were the youngest person on planet Earth. Every year, millions of trees grow because squirrels forget where they buried their acorns. Norway once knighted a penguin. The voices of… Read More ›