Other Men's Flowers

Last year I posted a note of the captions to some of Thurber’s drawings without showing the drawings, thus irritating some unfortunate peop...

The admirable Martin Gardiner (not to be confused with the equally admirable Martin Gardner ) maintains on his website for the delight of al...

A much admired competitor in the 1907 Peking to Paris car "challenge" was a Frenchman called Auguste Pons, who had to withdraw wh...

At breakfast a couple of weeks ago—toast very sparingly spread with Patum Peperium (The Gentleman’s Relish), if you must know—I was glancing...

I noted last July that many English words which end in och or ock represent unattractive or uninteresting things. Here’s another trio of le...

Bought a packet of duck legs confit the other day and found this note on the back. What on earth does it mean ? That you could have frozen ...

Search for information on this topic in Conservapedia—“the conservative encyclopedia you can trust”—and you will learn that “ Theoretically...

I was filled with horror—no, mildly irritated—to read that outside the UK Mr Bean has become an “iconic figure” representing “an English ar...

Opinions differ on the meaning of this word. Wikipedia , written collaboratively by volunteers and with over two million articles, defines ...

After some Thurber prose, let's have one of his drawings: You and your premonitions!

This is my favourite James Thurber piece. It is a description of an incident in which he is guest of honour at a banquet and has reluctantly...

A curate's egg is something that is partly good and partly bad, but as a result is entirely spoiled. Nowadays we use it to mean somethi...

The Oxford English Dictionary releases every three months some notes on the quarter’s updates to the online edition, consisting of the revis...

In a column on the left of this page there is a list of the categories into which fall the 570 (as of today) posts in Other Men's Flower...

Farewell then, Lieutenant General Baron Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, who has died aged 93. In April 1945, then a major and adjutant to the...

Here’s a preview of one of the items featured in the March edition of Large Hats Monthly . It was worn by the Queen at the Westminster Abbey...

Back in November 2004, under the title First Lines , I invited readers to identify twenty-five openings to books or short stories. Not surpr...

The Sunday Times has long since ceased to be a serious newspaper and has been fighting OK! and Hello! for the position of house journal t...

For years I have assumed that those who pronounce "H" as if it began with that letter were merely uneducated, but it seems that th...

Meaning Breaker of Rocks . That was what they called Sir Henry Morton Stanley when he was in the Congo, and probably other things too, sinc...