Will Chalk
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's a very important dictionary because it's essentially the first dictionary, although you mentioned crime, to bring in non-crime stuff.
Now, they wouldn't have been there in earlier collections of slang.
The interesting thing, of course, is we don't know who did it.
All we know is it's by somebody called B.E., that's his initials, Gent, as in gentleman.
But as the centuries go by, there have evolved nearly 2,000 synonyms for that.
It's a repository of synonyms, of many ways of saying what is essentially the same thing.
Definitely not a ninny hammer.
That is lexicographer Jonathan Green.
It's been quite a week.
the international order underpinned by the nato military alliance that's prevailed since the end of the second world war has never looked more shaky relations between the trump administration and european governments are fragile and as we heard earlier president trump's comments about nato allies in afghanistan have put them under further strain
But it was the threat to take Greenland by force that really shook the foundations.
For the moment, at least, Mr Trump says that's off the table, but it was enough to prompt the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to warn that the whole edifice was already coming down.
There was, he said, a rupture, not a transition in the rule-based international order.
So how worried should we be?
Well, let's hear from the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and the Last Man, about the victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War.
He's been speaking to my colleague James Menendez.
There has been a sense amongst some that if we, they, can just ride it out for the next few years, then normal business can resume after that.
But from what you say, that's very unlikely.
But in the immediate term, I mean, it is a dangerous game risking a rupture with the U.S.
Can I ask you this?