WE described Gus McNaughton’s interest in word pairings at the top of the pages of dictionaries as “unusual” (2 September). It seems we were wrong. Colum Clarke writes to confess that he too has an interest in what he calls “apposite adjacents”. He offers a list of his own favourites from the paperback Oxford English Dictionary (2002). These include “Online Open-heart surgery”, “Metropolis Microclimate”, “Johnny-come-lately Jones”, “Monster Monument” and “Heedless Hellbent”.
Then there’s David Scott, who claims that the 1960s Penguin English Dictionary “has long been renowned for the page-heading entries carried under H”. He offers two examples: “the ‘Hat Hawk’,…
