This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. Rhyming slang is a wonderful vehicle for individual and collective linguistic creativity. The expression here a bit Derby [= ‘cold’] was submitted to the Evolving English WordBank by two contributors from Nottingham and captures the playful rivalry between…

This week’s selection comes from Greg Green, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. Learning to identify bird song can be tricky at the best of times; to the untrained ear it can all sound remarkably similar. To add to the confusion, many birds like to show off by…

This week’s selection comes from Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. Sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) describes how it felt to be an artist in the 1950s. Post-war Britain was changing but there was nonetheless a pervading sense of austerity. Paolozzi says, ‘we were all grey’. This sense of austerity was,…

A fifteen year old girl speaks with considerable charm about her beliefs, including the belief in ‘a spirit of Christmas.

UOSH Volunteer and poet, Amy Evans Bauer, writes: As we approach solstice, pantomime horses, the holly and the ivy, and festive schedules in which we often have to be in two places at once, here is the other half of WordBank’s own two-parter… Part 1 of our celebratory selection contained…