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.
Global English
Leave off, will you? Britain should celebrate ‘regional’ accents
British parliamentarian and shadow cabinet minister Angela Rayner has recently been the victim of online abuse because of the way she speaks.
Language change and slang
A “shocking” etymology
The word shock originally referred to a military clash.
Language teaching and resources
Language barrier leaves refugees facing struggle to rebuild their lives
The study, Optimising Refugee Resettlement in the UK, found women, along with teenagers who had missed core education because of turmoil in their home country, faced the biggest barriers to integration.
Words, books, dictionaries and language
Most common surnames in Britain and Ireland revealed
The team, led by the University of the West of England, analysed sources dating from the 11th to the 19th century to fully explain the origins of the names.
Interpreting the alien interpreters in the movie Arrival
It got us wondering — what if aliens were to visit us for real? How would we communicate with them?
There Is a Crack in Everything, That’s How the Light Gets In: Leonard Cohen on Democracy and Its Redemptions
Trained as a poet and ordained as a Buddhist monk, Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) is our patron saint of sorrow and redemption.
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Greetings. This may be trivial but the search for this word is driving us crazy.
The word means “to leave”.
It is similar in sound to esquagitate or exquagitate _ (but I cannot find it under any spelling I can come up with)
Thanks for any consideration and sorry if this is a head-scratcher.
Perhaps you are looking for “defenestrate” – to leave by going out the window?