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Sharp-eyed pupils from a Birmingham school have used the latest linguistics software, developed by the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham, to show that one of the core Christmas catchphrases is a bit of a myth. Year Eight pupils from Bishop Walsh Catholic School used the specially designed online system to prove that Scrooge did not use the phrase 'bah humbug' very frequently at all. The pupils found that 'bah' and 'humbug' only occur together twice in Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol', although 'humbug' on its own has a few more repetitions. The software used by the pupils is called 'CLiC' (Corpus Linguistics in Context, clic.bham.ac.uk). It is developed by the Centre for Corpus Research (CCR) at the University of Birmingham as part of the 'CLiC Dickens' project - a joint project with the University of Nottingham that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The simple-to-use online system allows users to study literary texts and find out more about them and their fictional characters. This leads to new insights into how readers perceive fictional people.