Vocabulary Expansion

In today's The Word Spy email we learned "earworm".

It's a word we've been looking for, though admittedly we've always felt that those annoyingly persistent ("'74-'75", anyone? "Two Princes"?) tunes weren't so much lodged in ours ears as tumorously embedded in the grey matter. But it's almost perfect. The element of infestation that goes with "worm" is exactly right. It calls up a pleasing set of associations too:

• The moment in The Wrath of Khan where the parasitic mind-controlling beastie is released to crawl inside ?Sulu's ear.
  
• The medieval notion that tooth decay was caused by the little "worm" that could be found inside the tooth.
  
• The jump from earworm to tapeworm, where there's a new link made with the notion of magnetic tape.

It's a far better term than the alternative "sticky tune" which lacks the sense of invasion, almost violation, that earworm has. We're going to stick to the German original: "Ohrwurm".

Well, Folks, Here We Go...

Trouble in t' Balkans: Serbian PM Shot Dead.
Just what the world needed.

What Can We DO With This?

[Just don't ask how we came to be looking up "agio" in the OED in the first place. Please. We can't remember.]

It's too good a quote to waste:

The mysteries of agio, tariffs, tare and tret.

Scott, Rob Roy