language change and slang
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 21, 2010
Sitting on a bus recently, I spotted a headline in someone else’s newspaper that read: Humanitarianism 2.0. I never did find out what the article was about, but I soon discovered that Google has dozens of hits for this exact expression. And it looks like the 2.0 suffix can be added to just about anything, [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on April 19, 2010
I’ve recently discovered that many of my colleagues are closet Scrabble™ players; how have I made this fascinating discovery? By the fact they are all, without exception, incensed by news that games company Mattel is to relax the rules and allow the use of proper nouns and other previously verboten words.
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One (slightly cynical?) colleague found [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on April 12, 2010
Have you noticed how, in the past 10 years, a whole bunch of completely unrelated words have become totally interchangeable, all thanks to predictive texting?
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Predictive texting is now a feature of pretty much every mobile phone on the market, and love it or hate it, we’re all exposed to it in one way or another. [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 08, 2010
I took this photo outside my local copy shop last week. Right at the top of the sign is one of the products which the business supplies: calenders. Now these guys are in the printing business so they know about proofreading, spellchecking, and so on – yet they still couldn’t get the spelling right. But [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 18, 2010
While Oscar Wilde was in Pentonville prison in London, he was forced to walk on a treadmill for several hours a day. When this form of punishment died out, the word treadmill might have gone the same way. But by this time it had acquired a figurative meaning – and this now came to the [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on March 17, 2010
Couch surfing is this week’s BuzzWord from our online English dictionary here at Macmillan. This noun is used to describe staying the night at the home of another person, especially a stranger, for free. The term first appeared on and has been popularised by www.couchsurfing.com, a free and non-profit accommodation network, also called a hospitality [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 23, 2010
You may recall that a little while ago we promised you some downloadable worksheets to use with Dizraeli’s video, The 21st Century Flux, about the English language. Well, the worksheets are now ready for you to download and use in your classroom. The lyrics are also available as downloadable pdf.
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The worksheets have been devised by [...]
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Posted by Jonathan Cole on February 18, 2010
Hyperlocal is this week’s BuzzWord from our online English dictionary here at Macmillan. The adjective is used to describe a very specific, local area.
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Apparently, many large companies are now focussing their attention on manipulating and delivering hyperlocal information. (The use of ‘manipulating’ here is probably a little dark, no?) Anyway, with the appearance of local [...]
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Posted by Denilso de Lima on February 15, 2010
Denilso de Lima, ELT author, teacher trainer and conference speaker in Brazil treats us to another guest post on the topic of Brazil English. You can visit Denilso’s blog Inglês na Ponta da Língua.
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I read Jussara’s post on Brazinglish and had to write a bit further about some other interesting and curious ways in which [...]
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Posted by Sarah McKeown on February 08, 2010
There was me, that is Sarah, sat in front of the puter in my woolly toofles, after a hard day’s rabbiting, fagged and in need of a bit of spatchka, trying to gather together my messels and make up my rassoodock as to what slovos to write for this bloggywog. And I must confess, O [...]
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