language and words in the news
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 06, 2012
In a recent post, we saw that the word jargon – while more or less synonymous with terminology – has a much more negative feel. As always, you can tell a lot about a word by the company it keeps, and a comparison of the adjectives that frequently collocate with these two nouns is revealing. [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on January 03, 2012
We’re delighted to welcome Orin Hargraves to the Macmillan Dictionary Blog team as a regular contributor in 2012. Orin is not new to the Macmillan English Dictionary, having worked on the American English edition. Orin is an independent lexicographer, based in Maryland, USA, and author of books about English, including Slang Rules!, a lesson book [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on December 30, 2011
One of the best things I learned this year (from my friend Sylviane Granger) was that a lot of teachers use our blog as a source of inspiration for lessons and assignments for their students. But this isn’t really surprising, when you look at the huge range of material contributed by so many great writers. [...]
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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 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 Kati Sule on November 25, 2011
After a short break, the weekly round-up post returns with a selection of links related to recent language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on October 28, 2011
This post contains a selection of links related to recent language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on October 21, 2011
This post contains a selection of links related to recent language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on October 16, 2011
It’s ‘Dictionary Day’ in America: October 16th marks the birthday of Noah Webster, father of American lexicography. Webster was born in 1758 – just three years after the publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary – and published his own great work, the American Dictionary of the English Language, in 1828. Today’s Merriam-Webster dictionaries are in a [...]
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