Roderick Random News Today

Seafaring idioms aren't restricted to seafaring cultures, they're in wide use everywhere English is spoken, from the American Midwest to the Australian Outback. So how did they become such a mainstay of our vocabulary?

For former readers of Random Notes by Roderick Random, welcome (back) to The Borys Blog.

OK, so now we finally and officially have a U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania next year.

Sailors Beware

LAST week I wrote about the novelist Jane Duncan, real name Elizabeth Jane Cameron, who was born in Renton in West Dunbartonshire in 1910. By coincidence, today I am going to tell the story of a novelist and poet who was also born in what is now an area of Renton in the Vale of Leven. With all due respect to the Reachfar author Duncan, in the history of literature Tobias Smollett is a much more renowned figure, recognised as one of the pioneers of novel writing in the English language. It...