Matters of a hirsute nature

As any regular readers will know, I’m big fan of Neil Gaiman. I check his journal just about every day, usually as a treat to myself for meeting a deadline or finishing a piece of copy. It’s much more educational and far less fattening than chocolate.

Another blog treat is Separated by a common language in which Lynneguist (great pseudonym) makes observations about British and American language with a great deal of humour and style.

So I was delighted to be able to forge a link betwen the two when I dropped Lynne an email in reference to Mr Gaiman’s recent posts about hair styles (here, here and in an interview over here). The fact that she took my suggestion and ran with it gave me a big smile and a warm fuzzy feeling. You can read her post here.

It also inspired me to start blogging again after an embarrassingly long time away.

I met a new word today

The word is chaebol. And today was the first time I’ve ever encountered it.

I met it in an article which referred to Samsung as a “Korean chaebol”, which didn’t really give me many clues as to what it meant. So I had to look it up. I couldn’t find it in the online Oxford or Cambridge dictionaries but Dictionary.com came up trumps. 

For those of you still in the dark, chaebol is a conglomerate of businesses, usually owned by a single family, especially in Korea.

It’s not every day that I meet a new word. When I do, they’re often compound words  like podcast or blog, and I can work out their meaning from the context and understanding of their familiar roots.

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be using chaebol in my every day language. But it was nice to make its aquaintance.