A bit of a mish-mash (from misch-masch, Lower German or Danish, entered English around 1450; a confused medley or hodge-podge) this week. Let's start with a neologism...

ROLL OUT - as in 'the new marketing programme will be rolled out over the next year'. A bit of new business speak which everyone seems to understand but no one can precisely define. Closest old word would probably be 'extend', but why use one word where two will do? And anyway, roll out sounds new and dynamic and we all kind of know what it means, don't we?

At Oxford Circus tube station today, the voice on the loudspeqker urged me and other passengers on the Victoria line to "walk down inside of the carriage". Er, excuse me? What's the "of" doing in there? Why not just "inside the carriage"? Much too boring and old fashioned. Insertion of the 'of' undeniably adds a lilt to the sentence and has the added attraction of sounding American and being, therefore, groovier. (Groovy - from about 1937, US slang - of music, 'hep' or sophisticated; excellent, very good).

This brings me to my bete noire - the fantastically abused word PROACTIVE. All the more irritating because it's misused by apparently clever and well-educated people, often politicians and social workers, to convey the idea that they are indeed clever, well-educated, modern and dynamic and 'actively taking the initiative'. In fact the meaning of PROACTIVE has nothing to do with taking any initiative, is very, very narrow and relates to the psychology of learning theory. I reproduce here its one and only OED definition:

PROACTIVE - Psychol. Of a mental effect from a previous situation which is active in a subsequent activity, esp in learning theory, as proactive inhibition, interference, the inhibition of or interference with learning caused by effects that remain active from conditions preceding that learning.

Geddit? Probably not unless you're a trained psychologist.

And now for a bit of word trivia, for which I am indebted to the website www.dullmen.com...

There are only two words in English which have all five vowels in order: ABSTEMIOUS and FACETIOUS.

The longest word you can make using the top line only of a QWERTY keyboard is TYPEWRITER

The sentence THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG uses every letter in the alphabet

We need to know this. That's it for now.