Author Archive
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 23, 2011
“Can I have a word with you?” “What’s the word on the street?” “I’ve had no word from them all week.” “You have my word.” “What does this word mean?” It’s no surprise that a word as old and familiar as word should have so many distinct but related meanings. In the paragraph above, you [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 15, 2011
Stephen wrote an entertaining post recently about linguistic registers. In communication, a register generally has to do with what Macmillan Dictionary defines as “the type of language that you use in a particular situation or when communicating with a particular group of people”. (It can also refer to voice quality in phonetics, which is similar [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 08, 2011
Sporting English month has – so far – explored clichés and the ‘sport as a workplace‘ lexicon. Today Stan Carey continues with the discussion of the language of sport with a closer look at the word goal. ____________ In many ball sports, the goal is to score a goal in the goal. Immediately we see [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on March 01, 2011
In his book Strictly Speaking, the newscaster and author Edwin Newman wrote: “There is no way to measure the destructive effect of sports broadcasting on ordinary American English, but it must be considerable.” This is harsh, but you can see where he’s coming from. Sports commentary has a reputation for stating the obvious, resorting to [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 22, 2011
You might have encountered some of the new words being used to describe different types of holiday – humorous variations on vacation, such as daycation and staycation. Daycation was a BuzzWord here on Macmillan Dictionary; Kerry’s article also explained greycation and naycation. We’ve come across mancation before, in the context of man-words, and a blog [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 15, 2011
In December, Sharon mentioned Google’s Ngram viewer, a nifty new tool that lets you see how often words or phrases appear in more than five million texts in Google Books. Results appear in the form of a graph, which you can adjust by timeframe (1800–2000), degree of detail (rough–smooth), and corpus type (several languages and [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 08, 2011
February is by convention the month of romance, and on Macmillan Dictionary Blog it’s the month of romantic English. In this post I’ll take a look at the word together, because it is closely tied to our ideas of romance and love, but it’s an everyday sort of word that doesn’t attract much attention to [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 02, 2011
We’re really excited to have Stan Carey on our team. Stan will be blogging every week, paying special attention to global English and to the theme of the month. In his own words, Stan is a scientist and writer turned editor and swivel-chair linguist … which is perfect for us! You may already have met [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 10, 2010
As you know from last Wednesday’s post on ‘man-words’, Stan Carey is the first in a series of guest bloggers who will be contributing to our blog for two weeks at a time until Christmas. The first of their posts will be on the subject of ‘Global English’ and the second will look at the [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 03, 2010
We’d like to (re)introduce Stan Carey, the first in a series of guest bloggers who will be contributing to our blog for two weeks at a time until Christmas. The first of their posts will be on the subject of ‘Global English’ and the second will look at the ways that you (users) search our [...]
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