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Mind your language

Why –y? The evolution of a suffix

From icy to shouty

3 May 2014

9:00 AM

3 May 2014

9:00 AM

Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler, according to Sam Leith, writing in the books pages on 19 April. Shouty is not a word Churchill would have used in exactly this sense, for which no example is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 2001.

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