Live English
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Posted by Kerry Maxwell on May 22, 2013
I’m sure I’m not alone in having really enjoyed reading this series so far, and one thing that’s struck me is how often ‘Dads’ seem to feature in people’s anecdotes on lexical encounters. Well, here’s yet another one … My Dad, God rest his soul, was (unlike myself!) never much of a talker. Dad bought [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on May 20, 2013
Most verbal humour depends on some kind of mismatch between two words or phrases and the funny or unexpected resolution of this incongruity. My last post focused on a type of grammatical ambiguity that allows two conflicting analyses of a sentence, one of them ridiculous. More often, though, humour and ambiguity play on the multiple [...]
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Posted by Andrew Delahunty on May 15, 2013
My father, who was an exuberant talker and storyteller, used to conflate words, creating inadvertent coinages on the fly in the middle of a conversation or anecdote. He tended not to notice that he’d done it, but my brothers and I, and Mum, would pounce on them with glee. One time he mentioned someone’s razier-like [...]
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Posted by Jim Ronald on May 14, 2013
Our series on English as a lingua franca continues with a post from Japan. We asked Jim Ronald, Professor of English Linguistics at Hiroshima Shudo University, to provide a perspective on Japan’s engagement with English. Jim has discussed the subject with four of his students, and they give their views here. __________ What impact is [...]
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Posted by Macmillan Dictionary on May 10, 2013
A big thank you to everyone who took part in our “Say the Word” competition. The brief was to find any words in Beatles songs which are not ‘red words’ in the Macmillan Dictionary. And this isn’t easy. We mentioned in an earlier post that the Beatles’ lyrics are mostly made up of basic, high-frequency [...]
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Posted by Luke Vyner on May 08, 2013
As non-academic and uncool as it may sound and after a few hour glasses of thought, my chosen phrase is going to have to be eye of the tiger. It has become a phrase that is so frequently used in the confines of my immediate family that it’s simply become part of the furniture, part [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 07, 2013
New vocabulary appears constantly: we invent words, or more usually modify existing ones, to meet the needs of expression – or just for fun. Sometimes, too, existing words get repurposed, switching grammatical classes or incorporating new ones: verbs and adjectives are converted into nouns, and vice versa. This attracts predictable criticism, but it’s a thoroughly [...]
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Posted by Janet Byron Anderson on May 02, 2013
Today’s guest post comes from Janet Byron Anderson. Dr. Anderson is a medical editor and runs Medical Linguistics Consulting. Her book Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language is available at Amazon.com. _______________ If you’re of a certain cast of mind and want to know your prospects for life, death, and happiness you can open [...]
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Posted by Adrian Tennant on May 01, 2013
Back in early 1997 I was working as an English teacher in Quito, Ecuador. My family were over there with me and my daughter – Aliz – would have been 5½ at the time. I don’t think I’m any different from other English language teachers in being fascinated by the way our children pick up [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 29, 2013
If you had asked me as a teenager what a stakeholder was, I might have guessed “assistant vampire killer”. Why else would you hold a stake, after all? But of course the word is less literal than that – the stake in stakeholder is the degree to which someone is involved in something, financially or [...]
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