Groucho Marx was accepted as a member of a very exclusive club called the Friar's Club and then sent them a telegram saying "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

This is just a quick non-episode of podictionary to let subscribers know that the Oxford University Press blog feed for my Thursday episodes can now be found in the iTunes podcast directory. If you use iTunes you can subscribe to the OUPblog feed most easily by clicking here or on the iTunes image. You can also go [...]

You might wonder how he gets away with it. For instance if I wanted to call my book The Oxford Dictionary of Body Parts I might just hear from an attorney

Last summer I had the pleasure of meeting Johnny Carrera. Johnny Carrera is a dictionary artist. I bet you never even knew such a thing existed.

Sparkle goes back to spark which the written record shows us as an Old English word used at least as early as the year 725. Before that the earlier path of this word remains dark and neither the OED nor others can tell us much about where it came from since it doesn't show up in many other languages. Our sense of sparkle as a more twinkling or brilliant point of light doesn't begin to show up until about 100 years after Wycliffe's death. Then 100 years later, around Shakespeare's time—about 1600—meanings relating to sparkling glances and sparkling personalities finally emerge.

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