Wes Phillips

Huckleberry thinks I don't have sufficient respect for nap time.

Linguist John McWhorter casts a kindly eye on quotation marks conveying emphasis. Fine, but when he defends "impact" used as a verb, I suggest he goes too far. "Quite simply, the verbs view, silence, worship, copy, and outlaw all began as nouns. No one has a problem with them."

Chet Raymo manages to coax an entire essay out of a description of a kiss: "The way bees on a drowsy day suck honey from fuchsia."

Stevie Nicks would like her forties back. "'It was eight completely wasted years of my life.' Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'"

I think this is a not so subtle ruse to get guys to iron. If so, good job.

Word!

Euan Ferguson took the Tube last week. "Only three stops on the Piccadilly line between Knightsbridge and the centre of town, and I would have got there more quickly, pleasantly, and safely by crawling backwards through the linking sewers with a twitching rat in my mouth and open bleeding weals on my bare backside."