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
Past tense of that newfangled verb “text”
The reason it sounds odd is that we don’t have many verbs ending in -xt. But we do have verbs ending in -x (like “fix”) which in their past tense sound like -xt.
Infeasible or unfeasible?
Experts disagree—and for once, the OED seems to be wrong. It’s not clear when the last time the entry for “infeasible” was updated, but “infeasible” is not “now rare”.
Word of the week – foie-kage
A fee charged by a restaurant to prepare foie gras purchased elsewhere.
Improve your English
Don’t forget your teethbrush
Arts minister, but art thieves. Drugs tsar, but drug dealers. When you put a noun in front of another noun, should it be singular or plural?
Language teaching and resources
T is for teacher development
This is a summary of Scott Thornbury’s keynote talk at the IATEFL Learning Technologies and Teacher Development Joint SIG Conference, titled With or Without Technology, held at Yeditepe University, Istanbul in May.
Books, words and languages
An official mess
I quiz myself once in a while: How many official South African languages can I name? There are eleven—Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu—but I usually get stuck around six or seven.
The mind is a metaphor is a database
Pasanek describes the database as more a “heap or helter-skelter anthology” than an online archive, and invites readers to go looking for its “many strange and surprising metaphors”.
Cartoon
Higgs boson found, glasses lost
This cartoon by Matt from The Daily Telegraph relates to news that CERN scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
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