language change and slang
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Posted by Liz Potter on March 22, 2012
lifelogging (noun) the practice of digitally recording everything you do all the time, for example by wearing a camera that takes photographs every few seconds, keeping all emails etc. For the past seven years, Bell has been conducting an audacious experiment in “lifelogging”–creating a near-total digital record of his experience. (Submitted from the UK) Macmillan’s [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 05, 2012
In the sometimes surreal world of social networking, Angelina Jolie’s right leg now has its own Twitter account (@AngiesRightLeg), with almost 50,000 followers. And the English lexicon has a new word: legbombing. Posing on the red carpet at the 2012 Oscars ceremony, Ms Jolie thrust her right leg through a thigh-high slit in her Versace [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 06, 2012
The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on January 30, 2012
Humans never outgrow a fascination with new playthings, but after a certain age it is unseemly and unrealistic to expect a steady stream of surprise gifts from doting parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. One consolation for this loss is new words: clever coinages come along all the time to supply our craving for novelty. A [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on January 23, 2012
Learning a rule or convention in language gives people a secure footing in an area of usage. When the convention is ignored or challenged, this can undermine the pocket of security and offend people’s sense of what is proper and necessary. This might help explain the levels of anxiety and outrage we see when, for [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on December 30, 2011
One of the best things I learned this year (from my friend Sylviane Granger) was that a lot of teachers use our blog as a source of inspiration for lessons and assignments for their students. But this isn’t really surprising, when you look at the huge range of material contributed by so many great writers. [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 05, 2011
In a comment to my post about confusing word pairs, I said that as a child I called a pen a “biro” and a vacuum cleaner a “hoover”. I knew the terms pen and vacuum cleaner, but only later did I learn that biro was named after the Hungarian inventor László Bíró, while hoover comes [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 30, 2011
My colleague Finn Kirkland has mentioned his problems with the word serviette. I have a battered copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary dating back to the 1920s, which includes this entry: serviette n. (vulg.) table-napkin Note the ‘vulg.’ label (short for ‘vulgar’). The dictionary’s Introduction explains: “This qualification implies that the use of the word [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 24, 2011
In its most familiar sense, jargon means specialised, often technical vocabulary associated with a particular type of work or area of activity. For example, there’s scientific jargon, medical jargon, airlinese, and business speak (the last of which I’ve written about before). Jargon is part of a sublanguage, and is subject to forces of change just [...]
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Posted by Dan Clayton on November 21, 2011
Class English month continues with a guest post by one of our regular contributors, Dan Clayton. Dan is a middle-class grammar school boy who has tried to talk like a Cockney for the last 15 years after failing to talk like a working-class northerner before that. ___________ When Jarvis Cocker wrote the lyrics to Pulp’s [...]
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