Authors Electric

  You can call us anything you like except late for dinner ... We all know how marvellous words are, the bricks and mortar without which books wouldn’t exist – but pause for a moment and think just how marvellous … There is a word for absolutely everything – take aglets for example. An aglet is the little metal bit – or more usually these days plastic bit – on the end of a lace. It stops the lace end from fraying and makes it easier to poke it through eyelets or lugs. Aglets have been around for ages, at least since Roman times, but it is only more recently (around 1400) that they were given a name: derived from the French aguillette , a little needle. I have no idea what they were called before that: ‘That fiddly little bit on the end of a lace’ quite possibly – which given the increasing importance of laces in this period as a way of stopping your clothes from falling off, makes inventing the so-much easier and more precise word aglet a sensible as well as long over...