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Stephen Bullon

The meaning of Scrabble

December 29, 2009

If you’re a cryptic crossword devotee, try this one: “Sheds light in elbow attachment”. Answer later …
Instead of crosswords, some people reach for the Scrabble board at Christmas and gather the family round for hours of festive wordplay.
Although most of us see Scrabble as a harmless way to pass an hour or two, others take [...]

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Plain bad language – the winners

December 9, 2009

Well, it’s over. The Plain English Campaign 2009 awards were announced yesterday, and one of the winners was Lord Mandelson. Having left the cabinet twice in less than ideal circumstances, Mandelson is back in a position of some authority, and is seen as the government’s Great Communicator. But this observation, referring to the MPs’ expenses [...]

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Plain bad language

December 7, 2009

“Perhaps I could say, by way of introduction, welcome to our stakeholders. We look forward to our engagement, as we roll out our dialogue on a level playing field, so that, going forward in the public domain, we have a win-win step change that is fit for purpose across the piece.”
That was Dr Tony Wright, [...]

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Casting a spell on English (part four)

November 24, 2009

When you’re looking for a word that you’ve heard, or only half-remember having ever seen, it can be tricky using a paper dictionary. You might look up shedule, not realising that there’s a C involved; or if you want to make a clamour you might look for a claxon (though what you really need is [...]

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Casting a spell on English (part three)

November 10, 2009

There are a number of words in English which end with the consonant m followed by the consonant n. Words like hymn, condemn, solemn. We don’t pronounce the n so the words are pronounced /hɪm/, /kənˈdem/, and /ˈsɒləm/. When they form derived words, such as hymnal, condemnation, or solemnity, then the letter n becomes pronounced: [...]

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Casting a spell on English (continued)

October 22, 2009

There’s an old chestnut about the pronunciation of the word GHOTI. It’s pronounced, obviously enough, /fɪʃ/. The GH is /f/ as in cough; the O is /ɪ/ as in women; and the TI is /ʃ/ as in motion.
Not true, of course (it’s a made up word and you can read about it on Wikipedia, but [...]

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Casting a spell on English

September 8, 2009

One of the leading UK newspapers is always referred to in the satirical magazine Private Eye as the Grauniad. This is a humorous reference to the supposedly high number of typographical errors that used to be found in the Guardian.
Typographical errors have more than one category. There are miskeyings, such as form instead of from, [...]

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In the News: One Million Words of English. (More or less.)

June 10, 2009

An outfit in Austin, Texas called the Global Language Monitor has announced that the English language has one million words. Well, it has had, they say, since 10:22 a.m. Stratford-on-Avon time on June 10th. (Actually, the town is called Stratford-upon-Avon, but let’s not quibble. And also, the countdown clock on their website counted down to [...]

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Miss! Here! Correction: Mishear

April 15, 2009

If you’re like me, you’ll have spent many years labouring under the misapprehension that Jimi Hendrix sang ’Scuse me while I kiss this guy in his 1967 hit, Purple Haze. But in fact he didn’t – what he actually sang was ’Scuse me while I kiss the sky. There’s a word for this sort of [...]

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Bodily functions

March 25, 2009

Scarcely a day goes by without Robert Peston, the BBC Business Editor, telling us of yet another eye-watering sum of money being allocated by government to a failing bank, or an eye-watering loss sustained by a major corporation.
Here he is on his blog on 5th January this year:
And we can be fairly confident that they [...]

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