Language and words in the news – 13th April 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 a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Language change and slang

Tomboys, Career Women, Male Models and Other Words We Should Dismiss Forthwith
Basically, in the comments below a post, a man called a woman “shrill.” She called him out for his “coded attack.” I agreed.

Plus ça change…
Audiences at a broadcast of the National Theatre’s “She Stoops to Conquer” last week were reminded that locutions like “to Janie and I” are not the innovations of a grammar-challenged new generation.

Improve your English

Modality in Jokes
This post is devoted to the kinds of necessity and possibility that modals can express, and to jokes that are based on the resulting ambiguity and/or indeterminacy.

Books, words, science and dictionaries

I’m not really a curmudgeon, just annoyed
“Difficult” I’ll give you. Maybe even “cantankerous.” But don’t call me “bad-tempered” unless you want a punch in the nose.

The _’s daughter
Titles have a way of coming in waves. But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed quite so pervasive as the daughter phenomenon.