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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Excellent/unfortunate choice of shirts by this pair of fans at the NFL London game.

Two fans walk away from the Tottenham Hotspur stadium in Green Bay and Philadelphia shirts. The names on the backs of their shirts read 'Love' 'Hurts'

Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for "binge" in that sense as a verb is from 1977. Your friend may have independently coined the term, of course – that's a very common process in word-formation.

Screenshot from the OED:

intransitive. To watch television or films, read books, etc., for intensive or extended periods, esp. in a way regarded as excessive. In later use: esp. to watch or listen to multiple episodes of a television programme, podcast, video content on social media, etc., consecutively or in rapid succession. Frequently with a prepositional phrase introduced by on, indicating the thing watched, listened to, etc. Also transitive and (occasionally) transitive (reflexive). Cf. binge-read v., binge-view v., binge-watch v.

1977
I remember bingeing on television when I was a child and having that vapid feeling after watching hours of TV.
in M. Winn, Plug-in Drug iii. 22Citation details for in M. Winn, Plug-in Drug

1991
People who binge on movies, constantly change television channels, crave chocolate, act the seducer or can't stop cutting their hair..illustrate similarities to addictive behavior.
Atlanta Journal & Constitution (Nexis) 29 December k8

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

'... desire paths, which no one dismisses as "lazy".' Oh, you sweet summer child. I admire your optimism and belief in people, but it was very easy indeed to find someone who thinks of desire paths as lazy. I strongly suspect they'd feel the same way about these linguistic shortcuts.

Discussion on Threads (named redacted for privacy):

Would you call people who don’t go around this lawn and formed the dirt path “lazy”? If anything, it’s intellectually lazy to jump to that conclusion rather than try to understand desire paths.
Good urban design doesn’t fight human behaviour, it accommodates it. There’s a good design solution to this.
[Image: a piece of grass in an urban environment. A dirt path formed by walkers cuts off a corner between two paved areas]

Yes I would. There's a clear sidewalk and no need to damage the grass because it's a shortcut. It's called respect for the environment and others around you. I was brought up properly, to follow rules and respect property; whether it's public or private property.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

OED doesn't have any more idea than Wiktionary

Etymology
Summary
Of unknown origin.
Known soon after 1600; but not in dictionaries before Kersey's ed. of Phillips, 1706. Origin unknown: it has the appearance of a quasi-proper name or nickname, like Old Grumbles, Bags, Boots, and the like. (An Icelandic hunskur cited by Lye is imaginary.)

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

OK, can't find that one, but this interview has "It was like, who's going to die first?" www.beatlesinterviews.org/dbjypb.int2....

Extract from interview with Playboy magazine:

LENNON: "Such as Harry Nilsson, Bobby Keyes, Keith Moon. We couldn't pull ourselves out. We were trying to kill ourselves. I think Harry might still be trying, poor bugger... God bless you, Harry, wherever you are... but, Jesus, you know, I had to get away from that, because somebody was going to die. Well, Keith did. It was like, who's going to die first? Unfortunately, Keith was the one."

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

I don't know if I'd call this a garden-path-sentence or something else, but it's thoroughly confusing, especially in British English where "lift" is likely to be read as a noun ( = "elevator") and more so if you've not come across the company. #linguistics www.linkedin.com/news/story/o...

Headline from LinkedIn News that reads, "On lifts guidance, skips Black Friday"

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

You can still what it was by the alphabetising.

A list of courses at the London Business School, showing that "Strategy Implementation for Saudi Leaders" is listed in an alphabetical list between "Executing Strategy for Results - Dubai" and "Financing the Entrepreneurial Business"

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

@alakazammit.bsky.social Did you know that you're quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary? They've just added the word "armscye" and you're one of the five quotations they list

Screenshot from the Oxford English Dictionary online entry for the word "armscye". Five quotations are listed, from 1858 onwards - the most recent is "I need to remember to raise the armscye a little because it's like 1/2″ too low. @alakazammit.bsky.social‬ 14 March in bsky.app (accessed 14 Mar. 2025)"

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

@misterslang.bsky.social Have you come across "pair of rattlers"? In context it looks like it might be false teeth, but I've not found any other instances. books.google.co.uk/books?id=B8f...

Extract from Lady Singleton: Or the world as it was, by Thomas Medwin, 1843.

Relevant quotation reads: "By the aid, however, of a pair of rattlers, a madonna front, mearly parted to resemble her real scalp, and not a little ronge, she contrived to pass off for some years younger then she was."

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

We popped by a couple of days ago and your balls were glowing.

An image of Orkney library with blue sky overhead and a shiny concrete ball in front

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

What perfect albums came out when you were 16?* *No retroactive cool, please. Albums that were in the house that you actively purchased and listened to. Yes, I definitely had a taste for slightly folky but ultimately fairly mainstream singer-songwriters.

Album cover for Sting: Nothing Like the Sun

Album cover for Tracy Chapman: Tracy Chapman

(UK) Album cover for The Pogues: If I Should Fall From Grace With God

Album cover for Michelle Shocked: Short Sharp Shocked

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

It's not *impossible* to wear a watch on the side of your wrist, rather than front or back, but it's pretty uncomfortable and I doubt anyone would actively choose to draw it like that. And the little finger looks pretty weird as well.

Small part of the poster for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, showing a watch with the face on the side of someone's wrist, rather than front or back.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Since I seem to have gained a bunch of lexicographical followers over the weekend (hello!), I'll drop this here before sending it to the OED, which if I'm reading it right is a 24-year antedating of "Blue Monday" in the current sense.

Extract (via the British Newspaper Archive) from the Wells Journal, 19 January 1856. Relevant text reads:

It was rather a curious development of domestic affairs which the Times on Monday last contained. No fewer than six columns of advertisements appeared upon one subject, and that was "Education." "Is not this blue Monday with a vengeance?" exclaimed a young gent, as he cast his eye over the columns, angrily adding, "I wonder why the editor bothers himself with putting in so much stuff about schoolmasters and schools?" To this his most sagacious mother replied, "It is high time to go back to school, to learn better logic than that." "Better logic, Ma? —Why should the editor tell the world the number of places where boys and girls may be punished?" "Oh, my boy; you should be in Russia just now: then you would stand a chance of being drawn for a soldier, and that would be indeed 'Blue Monday' when you was hurried off to the army."

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 10/10/2024

In today's edition of "words and phrases are always either much older or much more recent than you realise", I bring you 'political football'.

Extract from The Star newspaper dated 10th February 1801, which includes the sentence, "It is not a question that should be started to kick about like a political football."

Incidentally, you can tell it's an old newspaper because it still uses the long s, printed ſ, which looks almost indistinguishable from an f. This is right around the time that the practice died out - the Star, for example, stopped using the long s in 1808.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 25/09/2024

Here's the culprit, pretending it had nothing to do with him. #ProofOfCat

A blepping black cat, half asleep on a pile of previously clean washing.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 25/09/2024

Sometimes #ProofOfCat doesn't require there to be a cat in the photo. Houston, we have a problem.

Parts of a Lego model, just about identifiable as having been a Saturn 5 rocket, lay scattered and shattered across a table and the floor, rather than displayed on top of a bookcase as they had been until a few moments earlier.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 16/08/2024

And a few months earlier, though in a slightly different context - a Temperance Society rather than something socialist.

Extract from the Reading Observer, 22 December 1883, reporting on a meeting of the Temperance Society and using the phrase, "educate, agitate and organise".

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 16/08/2024

Here from 1884 in "Justice: The Organ of the Social Democracy".

Newspaper extract (via the British Newspaper Archive) from Justice. Column is headed Answers to Correspondents, and the first reads:

T.M. Kendal asks "Why cannot Justice let well alone?" [It is because things are not well that we strive to "educate, agitate, organise." Is T.M. really a worker, or only a capitalist in disguise?]

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 14/08/2024

The earliest I found for this in BNA is this film review from 1956, but now I'm wondering if "planet dweller" is worth looking into?

Film review of Flight to Mars from the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. Test reads: "It's all quite fun — with able direction and adequate acting turning a fanciful tale into an enjoyable film. Novel costumes and planetscapes set off incredible technical details. I hope all planet dwellers are as attractive as Marguerite Chapman.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 12/08/2024

I've been able to trace it back 20 years earlier than your 1864 citation. No mention in this one specifically of "dancing on his grave", rather, "she would let him have neither peace nor rest upon earth, either living or dead", which is suitably metal.

Extract from the Evening Mail, 1 November 1844, telling a version of the story from the Lymington burial register.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 17/05/2024

OED has 1996 as its earliest citation but I've found an earlier one - 1993, in Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin (here quoted in a review in The Bookseller). I'll add it to my next batch of antedatings to send to the OED, which I do fairly regularly.

Extract from the Bookseller, Friday 26 February 1993. The relevant passage reads:

He does not claim that the Letters are unrepresentative; he contends, though, that they do not reveal a rounded portrait. “There is something performative about those letters: they turn to each recipient the side of his personality which he knew that person would most enjoy. That's why some of the racist remarks have to be, not quite taken with a pinch of salt, but at least put in context. I have tried to put his, to me, repellent views in context in a way that letters cannot do, however well edited they are.”

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 08/05/2024

Meanwhile our moggy Taz, who is anything but pedigree, is still going strong and causing trouble at nineteen and a half.

A mostly white cat with some tabby patches and quite pink ears lies on a blue blanket. He has his eyes closed, one paw stretched out, and looks very content that someone is stroking his head.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 29/12/2023

Definitely better than the American one with Alan Cumming.

Photograph of the cover of a book titled 'British Traitors'. The subtitle, in much smaller writing, is visible as 'Betrayal and Treachery in the Twentieth Century'.

No, it's not actually about the game show hosted by Claudia Winkleman.

Yes, that's the joke.

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 30/11/2023

Over on the other side, I see that automatic categorisation of trending topics is going well. I guess it's served with rum, but...

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

If you see this, you have to share an image from your phone without explaining it

The sky and some trees seen from what appears to be the bottom of a well

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Simon Koppel @simonkoppel.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

As Twitter dies its slow, painful death, I'm likely to be here more, so here's #ProofOfCat so you know that I am who I say I am. Taz likes Bluesky but says that at 19 years old he's just as happy these days with brown blanket.

A mostly white cat with tabby patches on his head and a very cute pink nose struggling to stay awake on a blanket

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