Author Archive
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 30, 2012
Madonna’s recent moonlighting stint as a dictionaries marketing executive is still paying dividends: another thousand people have looked up reductive since we discussed it last Monday, and it’s been the single most looked up word for the last two weeks. If you remember, Madge had said of a Lady Gaga song: “When I heard it [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 23, 2012
In 2011, there were 252 searches for the word reductive in the Macmillan Dictionary. So in the 7 days from 13th to 19th January inclusive, we would have expected to see 5. In fact, we had well over 2,000 individual searches for the word reductive. The reason, it would appear, was a comment made by [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 16, 2012
The weekly roundup on Friday carries a link to a story about the renaming of a well-known chain of British bookstores. It’s Farewell to Waterstones’s and Hello to Waterstones. Losing an apostrophe won’t make any difference to the pronunciation, but nonetheless the name change has been greeted with some outrage by some of the more [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 09, 2012
We get a few people looking up acronyms and initialisms used in emails and text messages, but there was a massive surge in look-ups for LOL on 3rd January. In the space of 24 hours, the number of searches went from virtually zero to 1,000, and then just as quickly subsided to former levels. The [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 03, 2012
One of the top words looked up over the Christmas period was the word grinch. Most people know the word from the Dr Seuss story How the Grinch Stole Christmas which was made into a cartoon for TV and later a live-action movie. As well as being the name of the fictional character, the word [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on December 19, 2011
Newspaper headlines have the task of trying to convey the essence of a story in a very short space. To achieve this, they often compress the syntax, leaving out articles or other grammatical glue. With the absence of such glue, ambiguities can arise, as it’s not always easy to spot the part of speech of [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on December 13, 2011
It’s the Plain English Awards season again, as Stan Carey noted in his recent post, and across the country winners are basking in the glory of an award or ruing their luck in being singled out as exemplars of gobbledygook. One of the recipients of a “Golden Bull Award” (for the year’s ‘best’ examples of [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on December 05, 2011
In the UK, our bringer of Christmas presents spends the night of December 24th coming down chimneys and leaving presents for children to find on the morning of Christmas Day. We call him Father Christmas, though he’s also known as Santa Claus. On what we like to call the Continent many people give presents and celebrate [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on November 28, 2011
It was Thanksgiving last Thursday, and traffic from the US to the dictionary site was down by 50% on Thursday of the week before. So I wasn’t expecting the US to be entering the greatest number of searches that day. As it happened, the two most searched for items on Thanksgiving were lip plumper and [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on November 14, 2011
Last week’s favourite entry on the Open Dictionary, reverse ferret, is a colourful way of talking about a complete change of policy, a change that is all the more startling because the person or organisation who changes their mind was so strongly in favour of the original policy. There are other ways of describing such [...]
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