1. It only took me ten years to discover this one from 2016 by Mark Forsyth for BBC Culture, The language rules we know – but don’t know we know https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know

You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one. All four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But we always, always say clip-clop, never clop-clip. Every second your watch (or the grandfather clock in the hall makes the same sound) but we say tick-tock, never tock-tick. You will never eat a Kat Kit bar. The bells in Frère Jaques will forever chime ‘ding dang dong’.

2. Cross fingers crossed that this piece by Michael Gubser for History Today is open access, The End of USAID https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/end-usaid

In the postwar era bounteous US foreign aid reshaped the world, for better or worse. With the culling of USAID those days are over.

Let me know if you can’t access the piece, and I’ll see what I can do.

3. Here’s some serious nit-picking by Word Smarts, 5 Comma Rules Even Professional Writers Get Wrong https://wordsmarts.com/comma-rules/

Even experienced writers struggle with commas. While creative writing allows some flexibility for stylistic choices, business, academic, and technical writing depend on precise comma usage for clarity. If you follow a particular style guide for work or school, it’s worth reviewing the rules — some may surprise you.

4. I have an excuse for not discovering The New Yorker Facebook Reels series of short videos before: I closed my Facebook account back in 2018 after the Cambridge Data scandal, however quaint that might sound now, given what we’ve learnt since about social media intrusion into our lives. Luckily, Maja Mandekić still has a FB account, and she sent me this reel with Colm Tóibín recommending three books that deal with migration and homecoming https://ww: https://www.facebook.com/newyorker/reels/w.facebook.com/reel/2082622105822290 Look out for his self-assembly spectacles at the very beginning of the video!

Here’s the complete archive https://www.facebook.com/newyorker/reels/

5. And finally, a long, interestingly idiosyncratic gift article from Robbie Collin, the chief film critic of The Daily Telegraph, The 50 greatest films of all time, ranked https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/2a0a6b28ec708680