language and words in the news
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Posted by Kati Sule on January 27, 2012
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 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 Stephen Bullon on January 23, 2012
In 2011, there were 252 searches for the word reductive in the Macmillan Dictionary. So in the 7 days from 13th to 19th January inclusive, we would have expected to see 5. In fact, we had well over 2,000 individual searches for the word reductive. The reason, it would appear, was a comment made by [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on January 20, 2012
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 Michael Rundell on January 18, 2012
The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 16, 2012
The weekly roundup on Friday carries a link to a story about the renaming of a well-known chain of British bookstores. It’s Farewell to Waterstones’s and Hello to Waterstones. Losing an apostrophe won’t make any difference to the pronunciation, but nonetheless the name change has been greeted with some outrage by some of the more [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on January 13, 2012
After another short break, the weekly round-up posts return in 2012 with the usual selection of links related to recent 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. [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 06, 2012
In a recent post, we saw that the word jargon – while more or less synonymous with terminology – has a much more negative feel. As always, you can tell a lot about a word by the company it keeps, and a comparison of the adjectives that frequently collocate with these two nouns is revealing. [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on January 03, 2012
We’re delighted to welcome Orin Hargraves to the Macmillan Dictionary Blog team as a regular contributor in 2012. Orin is not new to the Macmillan English Dictionary, having worked on the American English edition. Orin is an independent lexicographer, based in Maryland, USA, and author of books about English, including Slang Rules!, a lesson book [...]
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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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