Medieval English Revisited

This little piece from this day last year just popped up in my Timehop feed. As so many of you have joined me since then I thought it worth airing again. Was I in any way correct, or prophetic? My answer to that is that events since then have, I think, proved me right in drawing the conclusion I hinted at. You are, of course, perfectly at liberty to disagree 😉

Take It Easy

After Stevie kindly referenced me in her post last week, about the ways that the same words can mean very different things to people using English as it was originally intended or US English, I thought I’d return the favour – note the ‘u,’ America!

A couple of days after she posted I was struck by a clue in the Times crossword, which I’m showing you here. It’s 27 across:

If you don’t have the kind of warped mind needed to solve crosswords, let me deconstruct it for you. For ‘attempt’ the synonym is ‘try.’ The meat is ‘rump’ and the prime, i.e. first part of ‘expensive’ is ‘e.’ With me so far? Use of the word ‘eat’ often means that one word takes another into it, so the solution is:

T(RUMP)-E-RY.

Trumpery? Americans in particular could be forgiven for believing this to be a made up 21st century…

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