‘So, we have identified these new phenomena which will undoubtedly increase exponentially going forward.’ So says almost any young Turk, being interviewed these days on the Today programme ……….and there you have it: two examples of So used at the beginning of a sentence. The difference is that the first So is a classic example of the new introductory tic. It appears in the mouths of many ‘15-to-40-somethings’ and they use it to start their response to a journalistic question or to any other request for an explanation. What is it doing there? This use of So should indicate that the interviewee is picking up on something stated already; it is, after all, being used as a conjunction. B

Even the tiniest village shop nowadays offers a display of books and pamphlets dedicated to the local history of that particular community. The world, it seems, is awash with amateur historians who take infinite trouble scouring church records, the county archives and the internet, and who gather an enormous amount of information about their settlement or some aspect of its past. Their researches are then condensed (you hope) into a book - which, in its turn, often becomes a landmark in the history of that locality. I am reading rather a good example at the moment called Crosstracks to Hindon by Richard Dewhurst - Hindon being a charming village in Wiltshire, chiefly famous for being a

Personal memoirs have featured quite a lot among my immediate antecedents. My maternal grandfather wrote a short book about his early life as a rubber planter in Malaya; my aunt wrote a memoir of her parents, Figures in a Landscape, and my own father wrote a brief account of his youth and his farming career just before and during the Second World War. My Dad’s memoir, printed privately, proved quite a success - even for people outside his family. He knew what he wanted to achieve: to describe a social order and a world of agriculture that has completely disappeared, and which his generation was the last to experience. Dad recalled employing a local man to plough up a field with a shire

I’m listening to quite a lot of Talking Books at the moment. More entertainment for my mother but they end up entertaining me in the car as I scud around the countryside. Yesterday, we were both listening to From a Clear Blue Sky, written and read by Timothy Knatchbull. He is Lord Mountbatten’s grandson and was one of the three survivors from the IRA bomb attack on his grandfather’s fishing boat off County Sligo in 1979. You might think it would be harrowing, and of course it is, but he deals with the horror early in the book and then returns to early childhood memories – in particular what it was like growing up as an identical twin. His twin brother, Nicholas, was killed in the bomb atta

I thought I would take the opportunity occasionally to discuss punctuation. I know Lynne Truss has covered the subject pretty well in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but nonetheless my blog gives me an entirely selfish opportunity to ‘sound off’ about punctuation issues that vex me. No one I speak to seems entirely sure about the positioning of the full stop when a sentence ends with some speech enclosed within quotation marks. Some have suggested that, if the speech is an entire sentence in its own right, eg She yawned and said, ‘I’m off for an early morning swim’ then the full stop should appear inside the final speech mark, thus: She yawned and said, ‘I’m off for an early morning swim.’