Love 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 Elizabeth Manning on May 21, 2013
We all know the list of English personal pronouns – I/me, you, he/him, she/her, it, we/us, they/them – but there’s one word that interests me because it seems to have the function of a personal pronoun but has very specific connotations. That word is muggins, which is defined in the Macmillan Dictionary as “used for [...]
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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 Kati Sule on May 17, 2013
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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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 Gill Francis on May 13, 2013
You may be familiar with the not-very-funny jokes based on the old formula “someone/something walks into a bar…”. They usually involve a play on words, as in ‘A drunk walks into a bar. “Ouch!” he says.’ Exactly – they aren’t very funny. But some of them make useful points about grammar: A dangling modifier walks [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on May 11, 2013
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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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 Kati Sule on May 03, 2013
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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