5. Just Visiting, corner of the Monopoly board 60
6. In the Wee Small Hours, Frank Sinatra album sleeve, 1955 71
7. Yorkshire Penny Bank Building, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, © Mark Sunderland Photography, photographersdirect.com 84
8. A child’s hornbook, The British Library 100
9. US scholars toasting Ben Johnson on the 200th anniversary of Johnson’s Dictionary. Photo by Walter Sanders/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images 127
10. The Oxford Gazette, November 1665 135
11. Cover image from Chicken Licken, Ladybird Easy Reading series 146
12. Cover images from Harry Potter and the Philopher’s Stone, published in the UK by Bloomsbury; and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, published in the USA by Scholastic, written by J. K. Rowling 152
13. An early advertisement by Bell Telephones 164
14. Lukaut long bulmakau, a Tok Pisin sign from Papua New Guinea © Michael Pennay 179
15. ‘Betty Rules OK’ 1 June 1977: Residents of the Aintree Estate, Fulham, London, express their sentiments in a celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Photo by Central Press/Getty Images 184
16. Poster showing Karel Čapek’s Robot, Library of Congress 200
17. Belinda Blurb, with thanks to Stan Carey 214
18. Let’s Stalk Strine, book jacket from 1965 218
19. ‘Gotcha’, Sun front page, 4 May 1982 228
20. Emoticons, Western and Eastern variations 243
Word index
ain’t 158
alphabet 98
Alzheimer’s 219
Americanism 151
and 8
app 237
arse 45
bagonise 233
billion 129
bloody 120
blurb 213
bodgery 112
bone-house 33
bridegroom 43
brock 35
brunch 173
chattels 52
cherry-picking 239
chillax 251
cuckoo 64
cunt 65
dame 54
debt 105
dialect 109
dilly-dally 145
dinkum 176
disinterested 139
DNA 193
doable 93
doobry 211
doublespeak 207
dragsman 166
dude 171
edit 154
egg 78
English 38
escalator 197
fopdoodle 125
gaggle 91
garage 195
gazette 134
gotcha 227
grammar 73
grand 222
information(s) 89
ink-horn 107
jail 59
jazz 245
lakh 123
lea 5
loaf 10
LOL 241
lunch 169
matrix 95
mead 20
mega 225
merry 23
mipela 178
money 82
muggle 248
music 85
OK 183
ology 186
out 13
PC 230
polite 142
pork 50
potato 102
rep 149
riddle 26
robot 199
roe 1
royal 80
schmooze 181
shibboleth 119
skirt 57
skunk 116
species 156
speech-craft 191
street 16
Strine 216
sudoku 247
swain 48
taffeta 87
take away 62
tea 137
trek 160
Twittersphere 254
UFO 203
undeaf 113
unfriend 253
valentine 76
Watergate 205
webzine 235
wee 70
what 29
wicked 68
y’all 189
yogurt 132