Love English
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Posted by Kati Sule on April 26, 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 Karen Richardson on April 24, 2013
While not having one specific influence on the way I think or work, the word (and plant) dandelion is one that has accompanied me all my life. When I was small, my grandmother taught me and my sister how to tell the time by blowing the seeds of a dandelion clock. Although the method was [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 23, 2013
Sixty years ago this week, the journal Nature published Francis Crick and James Watson’s groundbreaking paper on deoxyribonucleic acid, which described for the first time the double helix shape of the DNA molecule. As often happens with scientific and technical vocabulary, the term DNA soon broke out of the specialized field in which it originated, [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on April 22, 2013
My recent posts (here and here) discussed verbs like teach and disappoint, which are both transitive and intransitive: she teaches (English); the festival didn’t disappoint (anyone). The grammatical subject, and the meaning of the verb, are much the same whether there’s an object or not. Today I will focus on another, quite different, way in [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on April 19, 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 Miles Craven on April 17, 2013
There is one word in the English language that I will never forget. It’s a word that I had heard of, but I didn’t really know what it meant until it affected me personally. Back in 2008, someone who is very dear to me had a stroke. A stroke is a brain attack. It happens [...]
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Posted by Saskia Iseard on April 16, 2013
Last week, Michael Rundell talked in his blog post about how the music of The Beatles had an impact on the English language. The famous band from Liverpool mainly used common English words in their songs (words like you, I, me, sun, and love). Michael also writes that over 91% of the words on the [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on April 15, 2013
Breathing is such an intimate and vital activity that it’s no wonder it shows up in such a range of everyday expressions, including many metaphorical phrases. Witness a breath of fresh air, don’t hold/waste your breath, take your breath away, breathe down someone’s neck, and breathe new life into something. I especially like Don’t breathe [...]
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Posted by Mark Roulston on April 11, 2013
Today’s guest post comes from Mark Roulston, author of Liverpool in the Macmillan Cultural Readers series. Liverpool-born Mark is a commissioning editor for Macmillan Education. Previous to his career in educational publishing, he was a freelance journalist covering on-field and off-field events at both Everton FC and Liverpool FC for the national and international media. [...]
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Posted by David Crystal on April 10, 2013
Since The Story of English in 100 Words came out in 2011, I’ve been giving talks based upon it to literary festivals. The idea was to choose 100 words, each of which represented a strand in the history of the English language. The hope was that, jigsaw-like, at the end of the book the reader [...]
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