Author Archive
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 06, 2012
The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 23, 2012
Learning a rule or convention in language gives people a secure footing in an area of usage. When the convention is ignored or challenged, this can undermine the pocket of security and offend people’s sense of what is proper and necessary. This might help explain the levels of anxiety and outrage we see when, for [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 09, 2012
Macmillan Dictionary’s discussion of plain English continues in the New Year, and though we cannot expect a year in which clear and meaningful language entirely replaces vague and convoluted language, it remains something to aim at for those of us concerned with good communication. In its Golden Bull awards last month, the Plain English Campaign [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 26, 2011
As the year ends, lexicographers and other word geeks traditionally put their heads together to choose or vote for a word of the year (WOTY). It’s not that simple, of course: different groups pick different words in different ways for different reasons. And it’s not always a word – other “vocabulary items” like phrases and [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 19, 2011
Last week, Stephen Bullon reviewed the 2011 Plain English Campaign awards, to which I’ll now add a few thoughts of my own. The awards aim to recognise the clearest, plainest public language, as well as the “worst examples of written tripe”. Browsing the winners of the Golden Bull category makes for instructive reading, and not [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 12, 2011
“What prospects are there for us post the proposals to tackle banana fraud?” If you read this sentence at normal speed – and without my having drawn attention to it – you might have come briefly unstuck by thinking it has something to do with posting proposals. More careful examination shows that this is a [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 05, 2011
In a comment to my post about confusing word pairs, I said that as a child I called a pen a “biro” and a vacuum cleaner a “hoover”. I knew the terms pen and vacuum cleaner, but only later did I learn that biro was named after the Hungarian inventor László Bíró, while hoover comes [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 29, 2011
Sometimes nature reports come from unexpected sources. The Twitter account of Iarnród Éireann, Ireland’s national railway system, recently posted a picture of a visitor to their tracks, accompanied by the description: “Another prosecution as Frog flaunts trespassing laws!” The company is to be applauded for sharing wildlife photos with light-hearted humour, but its word choice [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 24, 2011
In its most familiar sense, jargon means specialised, often technical vocabulary associated with a particular type of work or area of activity. For example, there’s scientific jargon, medical jargon, airlinese, and business speak (the last of which I’ve written about before). Jargon is part of a sublanguage, and is subject to forces of change just [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 15, 2011
Last week I wrote about the traditional prestige of the RP accent, and how its privileged status reflects class consciousness. My focus was on pronunciation, but the distinction extends beyond the RP accent to vocabulary, grammar, and so on – to the standard English dialect. Standard English is an important and useful variety of English, [...]
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