The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word. For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder. This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...

Among the anecdotal indicators of a country’s being developing or developed is the availability of drinkable tap water.  A developing nation which has laid down the world’s most extensive railway network can add safe water pipes to that in record time, and surely will. But, for now, it remains nominally one of those watershed development issues. I say, “nominally”, because I didn’t enjoy the tap water which I drank in France this summer. I actually suspect it. Even if it left the water plant uncorrupted, it may have passed through heavy...

The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.  It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists. There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.  Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.  Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...

I’m going to stop doing it. And not only because the law has changed. I’m going to put this filthy habit to bed… if I can.  Like that petty criminal in that O. Henry story, I will reform. My vice is tea-leaf chucking.  I’ve long thought of myself as better than other litterers. I would never have thrown the contents of an ashtray out of the window, nor plastic yoghurt pots. I’ve thought of the tea leaves I chuck as “like the leaves of Autumn”; fresh from nature and eager to return to nature. Indeed, the...