Many professionals may need to use creative or lateral thinking in their work, but here’s a competition that invites anyone to do just that for individual words. This is the so-called Washington Post Mensa Invitational – for which neither organisation...

When you consider the concept of inventions, anything from the wheel to the iPod might spring to mind. You’re probably less likely to think of a word, particularly not one you may take so completely for granted as ‘hello’. Yet it is believed to be...

For such a tiny punctuation mark, the apostrophe has an enormous tendency to confuse and irritate people. The reaction to this all-too-common frustration is generally one of two extremes. The first is to try to cut them out altogether. The alternative is to start...

The power of language is often harnessed to persuade. And love them or hate them – it’s usually one or the other – advertisements certainly have a way of getting inside our heads. Not to mention getting us to take out our wallets. But how many rules...

The police often have a hand in giving out long sentences. Now they’re writing them. A potentially record-breaking 102-word single sentence appears in the Association of Chief Police Officers’ comeback to a government report on policing. Here’s the...

Am I the only one who is taking the decision to ban the ‘i before e’ rule a little too much to heart? It’s been deemed too ‘confusing’ by the latest government guidance on National Primary Strategy for under-11s, since many words in the...

The results are in ... for Britain’s top ten most frequently misspelt words. And the winners are: 1 Definitely (Definately) 2 Sacrilegious (Sacreligious) 3 Indict (Indite) 4 Manoeuvre (Maneouvre) 5 Bureaucracy (Beaurocracy) 6 Broccoli (Brocolli) 7 Phlegm...

It’s always a great feeling of revelation (not to mention vindication) when something you have long suspected or known to be true suddenly pops up and proves itself out in the real world. I found this recently regarding the power of being precise. Now, naturally...

It’s not always true that your readers will want to read everything you’ve written – particularly if it’s a 300 page document. Even if you’ve done all you can to break it up and make it as readable as possible, the demands of time we all...

Are you struggling to come up with a new nugget of corporate gobbledegook? Could your report benefit from some indecipherable doublespeak? Are you floundering from a lack of filler? Never fear. Sloganizer to the rescue! The new application for the iPhone brings the...

Writer, broadcaster, politician and chef: Clement Freud never ran short of ways to fill his time. This was true until the very end. He died at his desk yesterday. The grandson of Sigmund ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ Freud, he first appeared in the...

He’s a shrewd one, that Sir Alan Sugar.   As he announced in the opening episode of The Apprentice, he realises that knowing every word to ‘Candle in the wind’ does not mean he is Elton John. Using our Suralan to Plain English dictionary, we see...