Archive for December, 2010
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 24, 2010
I wonder if the rise of text-speak and Internet shorthand will be the thing that finally dooms the QWERTY keyboard to the scrapheap? I’ve talked before about how the layout of the traditional keyboard lends itself to typing certain words, but of course that’s typing words in full; typing in abbreviated form for chat rooms [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 23, 2010
It’s frightening how many new words and phrases come up to describe criminal activities, because it demonstrates how crime-ridden our society is these days. There have been two new ones in the Open Dictionary lately – account take-over and shoulder surfing. When I first saw the term shoulder surfing, I thought it meant that thing [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 22, 2010
Using set phrases can be a good way for a student to sound more natural and fluent in English, but they can also be something of a double-edged sword. Consider with all due respect – at first glance, it suggests that you are trying to be respectful, whilst expressing a different opinion, but native speakers [...]
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Posted by Shauna Rae on December 22, 2010
Canadian English month brings you a guest post by Shauna Rae, a radio and television personality, freelance writer and social media blogger, based in Ontario, Canada. ________ In a rare rant for a Canadian, in this commercial, a favourite here, our hero dispels many of the stereotypes we sometimes get from those abroad. Mostly, I [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 21, 2010
Here’s a fun toy for you to play with over the Christmas holidays – the Culturomics database, which allows you to type in a word, name or phrase and find out how often it’s been used in books in the past 200 years. The database contains 500 billion words from five million books, and is [...]
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Posted by Ken Wilson on December 20, 2010
We continue Canadian English month with a guest post by ELT writer and blogger Ken Wilson. Ken has an American wife, a Canadian mother-in-law, an Irish son-in-law and a Spanish sister-in-law. His Yorkshire nephew’s wife is from St Vincent in the Caribbean. He spends a lot of time in North America, particularly in the Canadian [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 20, 2010
Here’s a very seasonal new acronym I heard for the first time the other day – QUACKing, or Quirky Unusual Acts of Christmas Kindness. Apparently, the idea is to commit random acts of kindness in the run-up to the festive season, for no other reason than because you can. So, you might pay the bus [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on December 17, 2010
Similarly to this time last year, we are bringing you a list of those blog posts on the Macmillan Dictionary Blog which have been the most popular in terms of number of readers. Many of them still have ongoing conversations so have a read and join in by commenting! I would like to take this [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on December 16, 2010
Christmas is a big event in the UK. The Americans have Thanksgiving and the Dutch have Sinterklaas – but we love our Christmas! One potent symbol of this festival is the Christmas tree and as I open my box of decorations to put on the tree, I get to use some of my favourite Christmassy words. [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 16, 2010
Have you ever tried bookcrossing, and if so, what’s the best book you’ve left, or found, in this way? Bookcrossing is a way of spreading books by leaving them in public places (for example, a park bench) for someone else to pick up and enjoy. The idea has been around for 10 years now, and [...]
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