Sublime

Assistant: . . . I beg your pardon? Mr Pest: No, Edmund Wells. Assistant: . . . I think you’ll find Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield, sir. Mr Pest: No, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield with two ‘p’s. This is David Coperfield with one ‘p’ by Edmund Wells. Assistant: (a little sharply) Well, in that case we don’t have it. Mr Pest: Funny

without dialects there is no language.

Cassandra looked dumbfounded. “Helen, chattering for hours? That doesn’t seem possible.” “I wouldn’t have thought she had that much to say,” Pandora agreed. “Perhaps it’s just that she’s never able to slide a word in edgewise,” West remarked blandly.

two firm favourites in the Arsenal manager’s own lexicon: the adverb footballistically (‘footballistically, he’s ready for the first team’), and the adjective handbrakeish (‘I felt we were a little handbrakish today’).

Numerous words and expressions used in mainstream English started life in magic. Some of them, like phoney, are unexpected. The fraudulent practice of the fawney-rig was first recorded in the USA at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1823 Pierce Egan, a chronicler of popular pursuits and low life in England, described how the trick worked. ‘A fe