Sitting on my desk is an interesting calendar which was a surprise pre-Christmas gift from a good friend. It is a calendar that offers for each day of the year an old, largely forgotten English word of which, of course, there are hundreds. English, as a language, is somewhat ancient, remarkably resilient and quite stunningly adaptive, absorbing into its lexicon new words, constructs and spellings on a continual basis. And it has been doing this for well over a couple of thousand years.

Every invasion, whether of military conquest or peaceful mass immigration has seen the language twist and turn to accommodate new words, phrases and pronunciations to the extent that there are probably few core languages in the world that English has not borrowed from at one time or another. English is a true mongrel. The word of the day for January 1st was truly apposite – ‘crapulous’ – and defined in an 1897 dictionary as:

Sick by intemperance connected or associated with drunkenness!

I’m sure that many of us suffered from this or witnessed the suffering in others as we did when our youngest son came home at 2 in the afternoon from a new year party that had started at 6 the evening before. He was most definitely and quite clearly crapulous indeed.