English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.

The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South.

Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.

I do not Twitter. I don't want to Twitter, and I don't see any point in Twittering. The last thing I want to do is tell people what I'm doing at the moment because I'm probably not doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

I do not know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat's insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug, and someone has tracked it all over onto the other rug. I do not know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They do not seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while they are doing it. It's their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.

Twiddle-twiddle away at my softly clicky keyboard for a while, making twiddly adjustments all along- and then print what I have twiddled. Glare at the printout and snarl and curse and scribble almost illegibly all over it with a ballpoint pen. Go back to the machine and enter the scribbles. Repeat this procedure until I hate the very meaning of every word I know.