language change and slang
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on August 02, 2010
When I was thirteen, I went to a chess championship in Southend-on-Sea. It was grey and windswept, and I was a little lonely and homesick, and as far as I remember I lost all my games. I remember just one spark of colour in this otherwise cheerless scene: my partner in one game, delighted with [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on July 28, 2010
It seems there’s a new, and somewhat disturbing, wiki on the block – wikileaks. Apparently a whistle-blowing website where sensitive material can be posted online in such a way as it to be untraceable, wikileaks has come to the nation’s interest amidst news of leaked details about the US military campaign in Afghanistan. (I say [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on July 26, 2010
So, somebody please tell me when the word fine stopped being fine? When exchanging greetings with friends, I used to reply to any enquiry as to my health as ‘Fine, thanks’. When I still lived up North, a wry ‘Mustn’t grumble’ would usually suffice. This does not seem to be adequate any longer. People have [...]
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Posted by Denise Du Vernay on July 22, 2010
American English month continues with a guest post by Denise Du Vernay. Denise has been teaching composition, literature, humanities, speech, and courses on The Simpsons for over ten years. She is co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (www.simpsonology.com). Denise lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. __________ On [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on July 20, 2010
I feel I must begin this post by clarifying a couple of things. No, I don’t have a best mate called Tracey, and no, I’ve never in my life danced around my handbag in white stilettos in a nightclub. OK, glad we got that cleared up. Non-native English speakers may be wondering what on earth [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on July 06, 2010
Have you noticed how so much of the language of bureaucracy today is made up of abbreviations? We’ve got quangos, NGOs, and any number of G-somethings (G7, G8, G20). It’s getting to the point where you need a Dictionary of Bureaucratic Abbreviations just to be able to understand the News! It’s all a little bit [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on June 08, 2010
The Times recently carried a report on the Academy of English, an organization set up by the Queen’s English Society to “protect the language from impurities, bastardisations and the horrors introduced by the text-speak generation.” Anyone who’s now cowering behind the sofa in fear and trembling of these text-speak horrors can safely come out and [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on June 02, 2010
English morphology is famously simple. Most nouns have just two forms (dog, dogs), most verbs only four (walk, walks, walking, walked). By contrast, a regular Spanish verb can have 42 forms, while in Hungarian that can easily go up to 60 or more (see example verb here). And – since we are in South Africa [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on May 06, 2010
Could it be that the Macmillan Dictionary Blog has become a hotbed of nihilist political views? Are we seeing political apathy in extremis? Nah. Just want to whinge on about one of my old bugbears, namely, the misuse of the words hanged and hung. One of the many embarrassing truths about our past is that [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on May 05, 2010
The UK is in the grip of election fever, and elections – like wars – always give rise to new words and phrases. Like the last US presidential election, this is the first major British one of the Web 2.0 era. This adds to the unpredictability of it all, and ensures that anything interesting spreads [...]
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