language change and slang
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Posted by Michael Rundell on July 28, 2014
There’s a popular song from World War I about a soldier going off to the front. It starts with the lines: Brother Bertie went away To do his bit the other day (You can hear an original recording here.) “Doing your bit” – taking your fair share of a job that has to be done […]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on July 15, 2014
The familiar question of “how words get into the dictionary” is harder to answer when the dictionary is online. Printed dictionaries have limited space, so we have to be selective. This contributes to the popular view of lexicographers as “gatekeepers” – the people who decide, on behalf of the rest of the population, which words are […]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on June 03, 2014
Readers of our blog will be aware that – despite several decades of serious linguistic research based on the evidence found in corpora – the world is still plagued by self-appointed “experts”, who seem to enjoy lecturing the rest of us on what is wrong with the way we write and speak. Worse still, these […]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 30, 2014
Australian scientists have discovered that the more beards there are, the less attractive they become. Their experiment, reported in the journal Biology Letters, found that “women and men judged heavy stubble and full beards more attractive when presented in treatments where beards were rare than when they were common … Likewise, clean-shaven faces were least […]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 16, 2014
A few weeks back, our Friday column on Language and Words in the News included a link to an article by Gretchen McCulloch on the grammar of “doge”. Historically, a doge was an elected ruler of Venice, but that’s not the one we’re talking about here. And although the two words are homonyms (both pronounced […]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 17, 2014
Every year there’s controversy over the use of punctuation in public places. Often it’s the humble apostrophe causing trouble, and so it was in Cambridge recently when the city council removed the mark from street signs. Unhappy pedants armed with markers set about replacing the missing apostrophes, which were later officially reinstated. One anxious campaigner […]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 11, 2013
In a recent round-up of language in the news, we linked to a story about slang being banned from certain parts of a London school – though as usual in such cases, some of the banned terms aren’t so much slang as simply disliked phrases. Regular readers won’t be surprised that I’m sceptical about the […]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on September 24, 2013
In 1964, scientists predicted the existence of an elementary particle which could explain why some particles have mass. It later became known as the Higgs boson, and in March 2013 researchers working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) announced that they had found evidence which (probably) confirmed its existence. But […]
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Posted by Stan Carey on September 16, 2013
Last month I described how technological change has led to many entries being revised in Macmillan Dictionary’s recent update. A particular example of how this change manifests is through acronyms and initialisms. It’s worth clarifying the difference between these. Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters (or parts) of a series of words, […]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on September 10, 2013
In his book Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku predicts that computers will be built into so many of the things we use that they will “disappear into the fabric of our lives”. One consequence of this, he believes, is that the word computer itself will eventually die out. Though this seems unlikely, computer is […]
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