Author Archive
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 23, 2013
Sixty years ago this week, the journal Nature published Francis Crick and James Watson’s groundbreaking paper on deoxyribonucleic acid, which described for the first time the double helix shape of the DNA molecule. As often happens with scientific and technical vocabulary, the term DNA soon broke out of the specialized field in which it originated, [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 09, 2013
The annual IATEFL Conference is being held this week in Liverpool, a city forever associated with the Beatles. The conference opened with a lecture by David Crystal, entitled ‘The world in which we live in: Beatles, blends and blogs’ (the second ‘in’ is deliberate). So it seemed like a good idea to republish a post [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 21, 2013
The venue for this year’s TESOL Convention evokes memories of the long-running TV series about the Texas oil business. When Dallas was first aired on British TV in 1978, it brought a touch of glamour to a rather gloomy U.K., then (as now) in the grip of economic recession. The fast cars, cowboy hats, gushers, [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 12, 2013
A story in last week’s Observer newspaper included the sentence: “She now has a four-year-old daughter who she is bringing up in Turkey”. This would not go down well with Grammar Girl, whose numerous posts on questions of usage includes one explaining the difference between who and whom. She repeats the standard “rule” that: You [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 06, 2013
I was never cut out to be a language teacher. In the summer of 1980, I was teaching English in London. The school wasn’t very good, and I was even worse. I answered an ad for ‘trainee lexicographers’ to work on a new learner’s dictionary, and soon found myself in a publisher’s office, doing a [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 21, 2013
February 21st is UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, which is intended to “encourage people to maintain their knowledge of their mother language while learning and using more than one language”. This annual event was established to commemorate a protest march at the University of Dhaka (in what is now Bangladesh, but was then in the [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 07, 2013
The former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was fond of the expression “totally and utterly”. We were regularly told that something was “totally and utterly unacceptable”, or that she “totally and utterly condemned” some recent outrage. (She wasn’t alone in favouring this combination: our corpus includes 130 examples.) Not one adverb but two! So Mrs [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 31, 2013
We had a question-and-answer session on Facebook on Wednesday (January 30th), on the subject of online dictionaries. It was a great opportunity to have a conversation with the people who use the Macmillan Dictionary, and to learn more about their concerns and about what they’d like to see in their dictionary. Well over 1400 people [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 25, 2013
Old-fashioned is a tricky word for lexicographers. It has only one meaning, but several possible interpretations (or ‘readings’, as linguists often call them). This is reflected in the Macmillan Dictionary’s entry, which starts with a neutral definition (‘no longer modern or fashionable’) but goes on to indicate that old-fashioned can have both positive and negative [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on December 31, 2012
Back at the beginning of 2012, a throwaway remark by Madonna sent readers hurrying to the Macmillan Dictionary. Commenting on a song by Lady Gaga, Madonna said ‘It feels reductive’, and when asked to clarify, she just smiled and said ‘Look it up’. Thousands of people did, making reductive our most looked-up word in January. [...]
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