Last night my boyfriend and I were on a train coming back from a few drinks with a friend. At one stop, a group of younger people got on. They were in their twenties, I guess. They had been to some sort of concert and were wearing various items of band merchandise. I suppose 10 years ago we’d have said they were “emo” – nobody says that any more, do they? There were four of them. One looked like an artist’s impression of Guido Fawkes, there were two more devastatingly...
There are three things you should really avoid talking about on a first date. Food, politics and science fiction. Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, Doctor Who, Alien, the lot. Just avoid it if you can until you’re “going steady”, because if the sci-fi chat comes out too early on, the chances are you’ll have an intergalactic battle on your hands before you even get to the bedroom. So why is sci-fi a no-no? Put simply, it is extremely political, and sci-fi fans get very touchy when you don’t get their hobby....
Language is a wonderful thing: constantly evolving and introducing us to new words and ways of expressing ourselves. Every year, usually on an exceptionally slow news day, the nation's press prints any new additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, which usually derive from textspeak or TV programmes and quite often have only been uttered by a very select few, perhaps within earshot of an open window at the OED. It's a harmless PR exercise, really, and nobody is suggesting these new words will be anywhere near the dictionary in even...
“It’s exhausting to be right all the time,” the Know-it-all will tell you as he swirls his drink around his glass. “But I just can’t help myself. If I see an error, I have to correct it.” You may find this charming at first. Knowledge can be quite sexy, after all. "He's so clever," you'll gush to your slack-jawed friends. You revel in your new role as Marilyn Monroe to his Olivier, drinking in his fun facts, grammatical corrections and recommendations like lattes. But the trouble with a know-it-all is that...
