I like words. I use them every day. But not as often as my wife.

It has been claimed that women speak 20,000 words a day while blokes can only muster 7,000. Presumably, this statistic takes into account the listening time involved. After all, while you’re listening, you can’t be talking.

The average person is supposed to have an active vocabulary of 3,000 words in regular use, with a passive vocabulary of 15,000 to 20,000.

They will also know a few thousand more besides.

In one experiment, researchers counted how may different words there were in an edition of The Sun newspaper and came up with 8,000, which is about the same as the number in the King James version of the Bible. Many of the words were, however, different, and the Bible didn’t have a cartoon section or topless models.

The Global Language Monitor says a new word is created every 98 minutes and that there are more than one million in the English language.

This is not many considering there is the potential for 100 million from the combinations possible using seven consonants and two vowels.

A million is more than Shakespeare had and plenty to produce quirky lines of fun and frivolity when used in unusual ways. Such as:

A thief who stole a calendar got 12 months;

the batteries were given out free of charge;

a dentist and a manicurist divorced - they fought tooth and nail;

a will is a dead giveaway;

with her marriage, she got a new name and a dress;

a boiled egg is hard to beat;

police were called to a day-care centre where a three-year-old was resisting a rest;

when a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds;

he had a photographic memory, which was never developed;

when she saw her first strands of grey hair, she thought she’d dye;

acupuncture is a jab well done;

and those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

You have to smile. It’s Friday.