What is the 'it'?

The blog of the book

words

  • Walking backwards into the future

    A couple of days ago Number Two Son messaged me (as they say). He is an engineer; I’ve never known him to be especially alive to the nuances and quirks of the English language. He had a question: should he be using “backwards/forwards” or “backward/forward”? He caught me while I was out on a walk, Continue reading

  • The hyphen ninja

    Mugga Way, this morning. I have questions. Is it a school for learning how to be a secret ninja? “High Court judge by day, ninja by night.” (Be afraid.) Or is it the school that is secret: a secret school for ninja? (If it is the latter, they really ought to rethink their strategy: putting Continue reading

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  • Without a paddle: the third part

    There comes a point in any self-respecting spy novel, usually about two thirds of the way in, where the story kicks into overdrive. John Le Carre’s books are perhaps an extreme example of this. The painstaking, methodical teasing out of backstory, intrigue, and the setting up of whatever is to be the main action falls Continue reading

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  • “Without a paddle” revisited

    In case you were wondering (see previous entry), after a brief and (perhaps) dignified pause I managed to force myself back to “Karla’s Choice”. Possibly as a result of having put it aside for a bit too long, possibly because outside of work I am not the world’s most attentive reader (lol), but also possibly Continue reading

  • Without a paddle

    Here we are in January, one of the rare times of the year when my head should be well clear of judgments, grammatical forms and spelling mistakes – a time that I can set aside for, amongst other things, reading for pleasure. And yet. Last night I was sitting on the couch, making good progress Continue reading

  • Apropos of absolutely nothing

    Whenever I see a word in a judgment which I think I know the meaning of, but which is not all that common a word, I look it up in the online Oxford English Dictionary, just to be sure. This is not a bad habit to get into, because you never know when what you Continue reading

  • What is this sh*t?

    I recently had occasion to consider the difference between “sewerage” and “sewage”. I had never consciously turned my mind to this before. I had been inclined to think that, like “flammable” and “inflammable”, they were two ways of referring to the same thing. Or that they were variant spellings; maybe, for example, one was American Continue reading

  • Sometimes it’s “nor” but quite a lot of the time it’s just “or”

    Not unlike with the use of “whom” (when sometimes they should just have used “who”) – a topic that I write about in the book – the judicial tendency towards longer, and/or more fancier-sounding, words can lead a judge on occasion to write “nor” when what they really should have written was “or”. Sometimes I Continue reading