By David Simpson and Frank Jouandoudet

It’s almost fifty years since my brother David and I used to kick off the (very) occasional parties at our home in Cheltenham with our favourite track: “The Hawaiian Goose or Ne-Ne”, from Peter Scott’s little-known EP Wildfowl Calling. Peter Scott, TV presenter, writer, artist, son of Scott of the Antarctic, was best known to us back then as the director of the Wildfowl Trust (now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) based at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. Listen here for a flavour of those evenings.

Since those heady days my own interest in ornithology has ratcheted down one or two pegs, but David’s has been on an ever-increasing upward spiral. After investigating ecosystems at university, he launched himself into a career surveying flora and fauna at numerous reserves around the country: Ravenglass in Cumbria, the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast, and several others which remain in my memory only as accumulations of rock and grass.

David now lives in France, in the Dordogne region, and is a resident specialist on the birds and butterflies of the area. Several years ago, he published an introductory Birding Dordogne with bird checklists, where-to-watch-birds maps, and a host of other features. This time he’s gone several steps better with the Crossbill Guide to Dordogne, and he and local French naturalist Frank Jouandoudet have produced the authoritative guide to the birds and wildlife of Dordogne, beautifully illustrated and with an engagingly informative text. Whether you’re planning a holiday to the centre of France, or just interested in the ecology of the region, you’ll need a copy of this: order from Crossbill, NHBS or Amazon.

 

 

Apparently I’m now the go-to reviewer for chatty style guides. I recently reviewed A World without ‘Whom’: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age by Emmy J. Favilla, the Copy Chief at Buzzfeed. I enjoyed it, although it’s not the sort of book that Mr Fowler would have written without some additional incentive. Three colours on the cover, so no expense spared there.

You can read my review in The New York Times here.

A recent blog post for the Philological Society about my reasons for writing The Word Detective.

Cheltenham’s newest literary venue is the Suffolk Anthology, and yesterday I braved the post-race Cheltenham Festival revellers to walk up to Suffolk Parade to give a talk about The Word Detective. The owner, Helene, holds events such as these in the basement of the bookshop. It’s a cosy venue, with a friendly crowd ready with comments and questions if you give them a chance. We started off talking about stereotypes (the word and the thing, especially as it relates to dictionary editors) and then moved off onto Cheltenham words (promenade, spa), to see what a historical dictionary like the OED finds to say about them. I think I must have veered off piste somewhere as, before I knew it, I was halfway through my allotted time. But it didn’t matter – what I really wanted to do was to talk about words, not about the mechanics of publishing a dictionary.

While I was talking, I was missing the fourth instalment of The Word Detective as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Still, there’s always i-Player. The voice and tone aren’t mine by a long way. I thought I had written the book to dispel some of the old dictionary stereotypes, but the production tends to reflect them – including the Jeeves and Wooster-ish music at the beginning and end.

Next week I’m giving a lunchtime talk to the Friends of The Wilson in Cheltenham – a slightly different type of presentation on roughly the same theme. So it won’t matter if someone inadvertently goes to both. On that occasion there will be pictures as well as words.

A little polemic from The Word Detective against the stereotyping of lexicographers recently found its way onto Literary Hub.

I’m currently in the US, just a few days after the presidential election. As recent political events in both the US and the UK have shown, democratic processes can arouse strong feelings, and by definition not everyone will approve of the results.

One of the themes running through The Word Detective is the democratization of the OED (the “z” is Oxford’s preferred style, as well as the US spelling) and I’ve written an article about this for The Daily Beast.

Here’s my article in The Big Issue reflecting on my time at the OED, with a little discussion about the history of the word magazine.

Here’s my guest post on the origins of the word “detective” for the Oxford Dictionaries blog.