Welcome to the Lexiconfusion blog

So this is what the young people these days call a blog. I must admit that when Mr Bennett first used the word, I thought a piece of gristle from Mrs Spelling’s steak and kidney pie had caught in his throat and he was trying to dislodge it with a violent eructation:

‘Mr Teed, shall we start a – [blog!]…?’

‘Bless you, Mr Bennett, that was a nasty one’, I replied from the top of the Scriptorium’s stepladders, where I was perusing volumes relating to impetigo.

‘No, a blog!’ Mr Bennett repeated.

‘There you go again. I shall have to speak to Mrs Spelling about her butcher. Far too much gristle.’

‘Damn it, man’, my colleague ejaculated, ‘it’s what youngsters do on the internet when they are not being preyed on by paedophiles’.

‘And what, pray, should induce us to do what the youngsters do?’ I begged to know, descending the ladder with a copy of Dr Saess’s Green Legs and Hams firmly under my arm. ‘Do we not bury ourselves here within this bilbiographic mausoleum’ – I waved a hand at our beloved, lofty Scriptorium – ‘precisely so that we have no contact with the youngsters and their misguided antics?’

‘Quite so, Mr Teed, quite so, but a blog might just, well, be useful. For our readers’.

‘Our readers, Mr Bennett? But we have no readers!’

‘Someone must read our Lexiconfusion entries which have appeared weekly in Saturday’s Times magazine since 2004′, Mr Bennett retorted in a strangely disembodied voice, sounding remarkably like a man in a cheap advertisement, in fact.

‘Well we know who those readers are. They comprise you, me, Mrs Spelling, Mrs Spelling’s sister Muriel and the Revd Oakes, who wrote in 2005 to take violent issue with our interpretation of the word Quarrel. I make that five.’

‘Mr Teed you do us both an injustice. For all we know there could be as many as a dozen people out there who bother to read our work. And a blog would connect us to them’.

Not since Mr Bennett’s encounter with the Patagonian Paper-clip Priest had I known him to be this evangelical, and so it was with that in mind that I consented to try his suggestion, and thus find myself writing these first words of our very own weblog. I hope there is nothing thus far that may offend the Revd Oakes.