Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

That approach was first used by German scholars, and then Brit­ish ones, just over a century ago, on the texts sacred to Christian­ity, using techniques honed on the writings of Greece and Rome. From small differences in the four Gospels, they drew big conclu­sions. Matthew speaks of a lamp giving light to "all those in the house"; Luke speaks of a lamp to guide "those coming into the house".

Nowadays, all the world over, people speak with accents.

Halloween bridges the retailers' gap between the return to school and Christmas.

Now that "nigger" (which he calls the N-word) has become taboo in polite society, what happens to Niggerhead Point? The author notes in passing that this cape on Lake Ontario was thus named because it was a point on the laudable underground railroad that helped thousands of escaped slaves to freedom in Canada. That interesting historical association sur­vives in the first name change, to Negrohead Point (which remains on federal maps). But to call it merely Graves Point (as New York state maps do) seems a pity. "Nigger" and "Jap" are now banned on American maps, though a Dago Gulch survives in western Montana. More puzzling to the non-American is the onslaught on the use of "Squaw", which accord­ing to some activists (though not philologists) is not an innocent word for a Native American woman, but a derogatory term for her vagina. So Squaw Peak is now set to be renamed after Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman in the American army to be killed in combat.

Philosophers have rarely flourished on foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Konigsberg.

Echoing ancient thinkers such as Democritus and Lucretius, they held ideas that were to prove too revolutionary even for a revolutionary age.

The apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.

Nationalism and religion can be a toxic brew.

Myth and fantasy populate the world with "othermen"— the elves, goblins, dwarfs and giants that live in the wild wood, in the cave or on the high mountain peak. Not animal, but not quite human either, they feed fear and imagination in equal quantity. Nor are such creatures merely the province of the past and the poetaster.

It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.

If this walking penitentiary is such a worthy symbol of religious piety, why isn't the burqa worn by men?

For broadcasters, more eyeballs mean more subscribers and advertisers.

Forecasts a decade ahead are no likelier to be accurate than a bet

on a horse.

Hell is a city much like London.

When is a Jew not a Jew? When he's a Karaite.

He matured into a man of laconic, sardonic, quintessentially Roman aphorisms: "If you think ill of others, you commit a sin. But you often get it right."

Morality is powerful stuff, and as such should be used with care.

No wonder novice writers are often at a loss, and put commas where they do not belong. The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.

£ £ Science, technology, progress, history, civilization

Einstein: "Why is it that nobody understands me, but everybody likes me?"

Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon's law: "90% of every­thing is crap."

Privacy is also at risk. Users were appalled when it emerged iRobot, a ro­botic vacuum cleaner, not only cleans the floor, but creates a digital map of the home's interior that can then be sold on to advertisers, Standard

Innovation, a maker of a connected vibrator called We-Vibe, was recent­ly ordered to pat customers $10,000 each after hackers discovered that the device was recording highly personal information about its owners.

Three-quarters of Americans admit that they search the web, send e-mails and check their social-media accounts in the bathroom.

The GAFA, as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are collectively called, also have good arguments on their side.

Compared with the size of its brain, an elephant's hippocampuses are about 40% larger than those of a human being, suggesting that the old proverb about an elephant never forgetting may have a grain of truth in it.

For every Spotify there is a WannaCry.

Do you know how a toilet works?