Pundit is the only spelling in the dictionary. Where pundint comes from, why the extra n feels right in the mouth, and how the word reached English in the first place.

By Anna Zhila There is a long-standing parlour game we play with the past, filtering old films to see how they imagined our present. Blade Runner promised us flying cars and replicants by 2019. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men gave us a fertility crisis by 2027. But perhaps the most chillingly accurate prophecy came from…

By Yulia Tulegenova Why a Single Letter in "Cancellable" Tells a Story There is a quiet and revealing battle being waged across the Atlantic Ocean. It is a battle fought not with armies, but with a single, humble consonant. The battle is over the correct spelling of a single word: "cancellable." Or is it "cancelable"?…

By Yulia Tulegnova This year, the highest-grossing film in the world will likely not come from Hollywood. It will not star Tom Cruise, nor will it emerge from the sprawling universes of Marvel or DC. The title that has quietly conquered the global box office is Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, a Chinese animated blockbuster that…

Retube or retubed depends on the tense, and both are real words. When each one is used, and where the term turns up outside engineering.

By Yulia Tulegenova, Artist and Film Critic Hollywood loves a wunderkind, and after the sleeper success of 2022’s Barbarian, Zach Cregger was anointed. That film, a masterclass in narrative misdirection that turned an Airbnb rental into a subterranean nightmare, was a commercial juggernaut, earning ten times its modest budget. But more than that, it was a…

By Yulia Tulegenova, artist and film critic There are some stories that refuse to end. They do not fade into history; they curdle into mythology, their facts hardening into fixed narrative points, their human figures becoming characters trapped in a forever-loop of public performance. The murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007, and the…

Helpful is the correct spelling. The useful part is why so many people write helpfull, which words really do double the l, and where the rule stops working.

Babysat is the correct past tense. Which verbs behave like sit, why the regular -ed ending fails here, and the related forms that trip people up.

By Yulia Tulegenova Why We Invent Words Like "Worldwidely" There is a strange and beautiful ghost that haunts the English language. It is the ghost of a word that does not exist, but perhaps should. The word is “worldwidely.” It is a word you will not find in any dictionary. It is a word that…

By Yulia Tulegenova, artist and film critic There are certain television shows that lodge themselves in the public imagination, not just as stories, but as puzzles. For nearly a decade, The Blacklist was such a puzzle. And at its very heart was a single, electrifying question: who is Raymond Reddington? The answer, when it finally arrived in…

By Yulia Tulegenova, artist and literary critic Language has always been a mirror, reflecting the anxieties and aspirations of its time. But the latest additions to the Cambridge Dictionary feel less like a reflection and more like a fever chart. Words like ‘skibidi’, ‘delulu’, and ‘tradwife’ have been formally recognised, confirming what many of us…

By Anna Zhila, artist, art and music critic The Unseen World of photographer Natalia Polomina There is a certain kind of art that does not announce itself. It is not born in the bustling art capitals of the world, nor is it concerned with the loud, often cynical, conversation of the contemporary art market. It…

By Anna Zhila There is a moment at the 2005 Academy Awards that serves as a perfect, miniature origin story for Taika Waititi. His short film, Two Cars, One Night, is nominated. As the nominees in his category are read out, the camera cuts to each hopeful, anxious face. But Waititi is not anxious. He is…

By Anna Zhila At first glance, the pairing seems unlikely. A Catalan architect whose buildings erupt from the earth like living organisms; a Russian mystic who sought to paint the sound of the universe; and a Swiss-German draughtsman who saw his work as the act of "taking a line for a walk." Antoni Gaudí, Wassily…