From the category archives:

language change and slang

  • New media – friend or foe for the English language?

    Posted by on March 28, 2009

    In the beginning there was the letter. Handwritten, focused, thought-provoking and sincere. Sentences would be considered, structured, and formulated in a way that could evoke any number of feelings and emotions, and it was the sort of piece that, when you finished writing, you felt content with the product in front of you: happy to [...]

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  • Bored of life? What Dr. Johnson didn’t say

    Posted by on March 26, 2009

    Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This is sometimes misquoted as “when a man is bored with London, he is bored with life” (and sometimes wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, but that’s another story). But what the great lexicographer definitely didn’t say was “when [...]

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  • Bodily functions

    Posted by on 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 [...]

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