-cule

Xavi is a 'Cule' to the bone, a man who bleeds Barcelona, and it breaks his heart to hear his own children tell him at their school they are saying he is not a good coach.

The talk, absurd at inception, had been that here was an anti-Madridista, a culé who resented Real and everything they represented, but look at his team in Wales last week – no Barcelona player in it – and look at his squad, packed with players from the Bernabéu.

In theory, the problem hinges on whether you understand the word to be minus plus the diminutive suffix cule, as in molecule, or mini attached to scule – meaning who knows quite what.

As time went by, we got regular actors involved, like Paul Valentine, who played the jester Motley, and Michael Cule, who played the monk, Brother Mace.

A number of the nucleotides in a transfer-RNA molecule are modified, that is, their structure is altered chemically after they have been incorporated into the mole­cule; most often a methyl group is add­ed to the nucleotide at some position on either the base or the sugar.