OED

My guide to thuggery

“Don’t they speak English?” asked my husband, tossing over a copy of the Daily Mail as though it were my fault. The headline read: “Missing in action.” It referred to Dan Jarvis disappearing from view in his new job as Defence Secretary. The headline writers should know that, militarily, those missing in action are presumed dead. The Mail meant AWOL – absent without leave. In 2024, I remarked how odd it was that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, should say about mob violence outside a migrant hotel near Rotherham: “It is organized, violent thuggery.” Now Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is at it.

thuggery

What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’” I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later.

content potash survivor fresh hell

What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’” I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later.