Author Archive
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 07, 2013
New vocabulary appears constantly: we invent words, or more usually modify existing ones, to meet the needs of expression – or just for fun. Sometimes, too, existing words get repurposed, switching grammatical classes or incorporating new ones: verbs and adjectives are converted into nouns, and vice versa. This attracts predictable criticism, but it’s a thoroughly [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 29, 2013
If you had asked me as a teenager what a stakeholder was, I might have guessed “assistant vampire killer”. Why else would you hold a stake, after all? But of course the word is less literal than that – the stake in stakeholder is the degree to which someone is involved in something, financially or [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 15, 2013
Breathing is such an intimate and vital activity that it’s no wonder it shows up in such a range of everyday expressions, including many metaphorical phrases. Witness a breath of fresh air, don’t hold/waste your breath, take your breath away, breathe down someone’s neck, and breathe new life into something. I especially like Don’t breathe [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 01, 2013
Michael recently wrote a clear and commonsense post on the difference between who and whom, basing his observations on corpus data and avoiding simplistic rules that have little to do with actual usage. He found, unsurprisingly, that whom is “in steady long-term decline”. I’m the sort of person for whom a whom-discussion is irresistible, so [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 18, 2013
We’ve looked before at dialectal vocabulary – those regional words and phrases peculiar to, or characteristic of, particular geographic areas. My earlier post focused on UK and Irish terms, but American speakers are no slouches in the regional expressions department. A good source of these is the US public radio show A Way with Words, [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 04, 2013
Our recent roundup of language in the news linked to a BBC report on a new phonetic alphabet, asking if it could “promote world peace”. The project is called SaypU, short for Spell As You Pronounce Universal project, and its website explicitly expresses the hope that this novel alphabet “might help making the world a [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 18, 2013
Consider this line, which appears in William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light: “One of the Sharman Group’s research initiatives centred around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV.” Gibson is a skilled and careful writer, and it’s clear what he means by the words centre around, yet some readers automatically reject the phrase as an [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 04, 2013
The news last week that booksellers Barnes & Noble expect to close a couple of hundred stores over the next ten years was met with understandable disappointment and dismay. For me and many other readers, browsing online can’t beat wandering through a building full of books, any one of which you can pick up on [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 24, 2013
Last month I examined the newly popular phrase fiscal cliff, a contender for the various Words of the Year traditionally announced every winter. The main such event is the American Dialect Society’s, which took place earlier this month. Its full list of nominated words and other “vocabulary items” in different categories is always worth reading, [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 07, 2013
Nominalisation is a bulky term for when a word or phrase – typically a verb or adjective – is converted into a noun. It’s also known by the less formal word nouning. Nominalisation is itself a nominalisation, formed by adding the derivational suffix -ation to the verb nominalise. Other suffixes achieve similar ends: good → [...]
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