Ah…rest, we could all do with a bit more of it and yet it can be such a rare commodity in our busy modern lives. The title of this article lists three words starting with rest…but beware! – one of these words has a quite different meaning. Restful, a lovely word describing something that helps you to chill out. When you reach the chill zone, you could be described as resting. Restive, however, is quite a different matter. It means the opposite of the other words, suggesting that instead of feeling calm and still, you are in fact fidgety with pent up energy and eager to get moving. Restive is often used wrongly, to mean seeking relaxation, so be careful not to make this mistake, or you might find yourself being dragged out for a bit of hill-walking, when all you want to do is flop onto the sofa!

Two words that seem to get commonly mixed up are wary and weary. These two words have very different meanings and so are not interchangeable, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Most often, people use weary when they mean wary. Here are some annoying sentences that have insulted my ears recently:

I’m quite weary of their dog, it looks really aggressive.
Since I got knocked off my bike, I’m weary of the roads around here.
I’d be weary of her if I were you, she’s got a nasty temper.

Perhaps I’ve got this wrong though. Perhaps there is a new atmosphere of extreme apathy pervading us all and things we used to find scary are now merely tiresome. What trouble we’d all get into if we really were weary of being wary and it’s always foolish not to be wary of feeling weary, especially when driving your car.

I’ve just made up a cool game for myself! Mrs Malaprop was a character in the 1775 play, The Rivals, by Sheridan and her propensity for using incorrect words in her sentences provided much of the play’s humour. Malapropisms, as opposed to the similar but different eggcorns, are where the substituted word almost makes sense but not quite, for instance, ‘O! He will dissolve my mystery!’. The correct word is resolve but actually, dissolve works almost as well. Malapropisms are pretty funny, but also quite tricky to make up because you need a large vocabulary and have to pick a word that not only sounds similar but might have a similar meaning to the correct word – and yet is hilariously wrong. Here are my attempts:

It is not a joke, I am deafly serious!
He gave little inclination as to his true declensions.
I have a strong body but depression is my bleakness.

Hmm – this is hard, but fun. See if you can guess which words should have been used in the above sentences and then, if you are feeling really grave – have a go yourself!

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Global English

Quebec warned to close language loophole.
The guardian of French in Quebec is warning the government to crack down on immigrants who send their children to English-language schools or face “social deconstruction” and the end of many years of linguistic peace.

Language change and slang

Washington poetry: Slams, open mikes thrive in the District.
Poetry is no longer the domain of the fuddy-duddy. Sure, it can be angry, profane, self-important at times. But it can also be — okay, we’ll say it — entertaining.

Turn a phrase and other old sayings.
English expressions that have strange origins.

Adults and baby talk.
Meanwhile, worldwide annoyance with the trend is ramping up.

Improve your English

5 Easy ways to learn grammar With The New York Times

It’s National Grammar Day, right?
Whether your approach to grammar is descriptive  (scholarly) or prescriptive  (nitpicking), March 4 is a day when we should all get along. Or perhaps a day on which we should all get along. Either way, March 4 is National Grammar Day.

Common errors in English

Language problems at the New York Times.
The Times itself, though generally very well written, is a rather carelessly edited newspaper that regularly allows some of the most common faults in contemporary usage to appear in its pages.

Things people say that I hate

The demise of standard English.
From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. That pathway was literacy … that teachers who endorse any kind of slang in their classrooms, including hip-hop lyrics, do their students a great disservice and only sustain illiteracy.

Books, words, science and the history of language

English-language book sales down in US and UK, up elsewhere.

Authors choose their favourite books of decade.
Authors including Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman and Roddy Doyle have participated in a survey to find a ‘writers’ pick’ of the past decade in books.

Tots don’t get their words worth from language DVD.
Regularly watching a vocabulary-building DVD doesn’t appear to help young children learn new words or improve their overall language skills, a new study reports.

UNESCO Publication: Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives.

New Chrome beta offers automatic webpage translation.

Oddest book titles prize shortlist announced

Mancakes
Cupcakes designed especially for men.

Language image.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

This post contains a weekly 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 and language change. Please contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include.

Global English

Malaysia: English language is not neglected, says Muhyiddin.
The Government’s decision not to continue teaching Science and Mathematics in English does not mean the language is being neglected.

Canada: Ticked off at the language police.
…that’s when the Office Quebecoise de la language francaise sent him a letter threatening legal action if he doesn’t create a French version of his 65-page [English] site.

Italian words spread to English language.
[Italian] became influential in humanities, arts and music. Italian words soon spread to other languages, including English. Here are a few samples.

The British are coming! The British are coming!
The only possible explanation for this British linguistic invasion is the putative social prestige that some Americans associate with British accents and locutions.

Language Change and Slang

By gosh, there’s a name for it.
A soundalike swearword that allows one to cuss without being offensive.

Would-be barristers to face language exam.
Prospective barristers will soon have to take a test to prove their fluency in English.

30% of Leet n00bs, Can’t rite Good Inglish, LOL!
“Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University.

Lasciate ogni poesia.
And so, he says, we should stop giving poets grants to write poems for each other, or salaries to teach poetry to college students, and instead let them engage in a Darwinian struggle for a mass audience…

The death of a language.
The loss of endangered languages like Bo is more a cultural than a scientific tragedy.

Improve your English

Use AI chatbots for English language practice.
An Artificial Intelligence chatbot is a piece of software that begins with a number of programmed questions and appropriate responses. The chatbot is then able to learn from each subsequent exchange..

A grammar lesson in Parliament.

More on online language learning.
Last week’s article on online language learning apparently hit a nerve.

Bad for finance: good for linguistics — and dnaindia.com.
Macmillan Publishing has teamed up with DNA India to offer its readers a unique, double-click dictionary feature, providing instant access to definitions, pronunciations, examples and synonyms.

Top 10 blogs for writers, editors, & teachers of writing.

Common errors in English

Miami Herald Has 133 Grammar Errors in 1 Issue: Cutbacks Symptom

Books, words, science and the history of language

Word it out – like Wordle with more options.
The complaint that some people have about Wordle is that it doesn’t offer much in the way of customization options. That’s where Word It Out shines.

My untranslatable novel.
Here’s the interesting thing about being bilingual: deep down, you’re more in one camp than the other, even if the difference is slight.

Goldilocks devices.
Web-browsing gadgets – like the iPad – which are positioned somewhere between smartphones and laptops.

Researchers parse pronouns, indicate couples using ‘we’ good conflict solvers.

Video: Medieval helpdesk.

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Global English

In German, Beamer does not mean car.
I was also astounded to hear that the Germans have taken to using the English word “sorry”. I even heard one person say “Sorry Verzeihung” (or “Sorry sorry”).

Language change and slang

This is English, rules are optional.
He takes us back to a time, half a millennium ago, when the very concept that there was a right and a wrong way to speak and spell things did not exist.

What’s in a number?
‘It depends on who you’re around,’ he added. ‘If you’re around people who say, ‘twenty-ten, you’ll say that.’

Social Media influencing the English language.
Slashdot effect – noun: the slowing down or crashing of a small website due to a huge increase in traffic when the website is linked to another, much more popular one.

21st century’s first decade is slipping away without leaving its name.
“If you are 60 years old, saying ‘my girlfriend’ sounds stupid,” Sheidlower said.” ‘Partner’ sounds too businesslike or suggests a gay relationship. ‘Companion’ doesn’t sound romantic.

Improve your English

Five of the most commonly misspelled expressions in the English language.

Punctuation.
Can you, at a glance, tell whether each abstract (from Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans) is from a British or an American publisher?

Common errors in English

Ever want to slap a landlord? Apparently we do.
At this time every year, we like to look back at the typographical and grammatical errors that almost made it, and some that actually  did  make it, into a few of Greater Media Newspapers’ publications during the year.

Books, words, science and the history of language

‘The Lexicographer’s Dilemma’.
By modern standards, Shakespeare’s spelling is a mess.

Listening to Braille.
AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.

336 useless facts.
The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter “uncopyrightable.” The longest one-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”

Language Video

Texting is good for the English language – It’s Only A Theory – Episode Two Preview – BBC Four.

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Global English

USA: Clarity, please: Democrats should start printing plain-language legislation.
But what’s far more scandalous is the utter incomprehensibility of it all to 99% of voters.

European English.
The most surprising element of English in Europe is that its prime purpose is not to communicate with native English speakers such as tourists.

A new trend has infiltrated the Swedish language.
English verbs like to dress, to sprint or to push are extremely common examples. People have made them Swedish by putting an “a” at the end of e.g. dress which makes it “dressa”.

Internet: bridging digital divide, protecting linguistic inheritance.
70% of Internet sites are readable only in English, yet only 35% of users are native English speakers. 4% of the world’s population speaks 96% of the world’s 7,000 languages. 50% of these are expected to die by the year 2100.

The beckoning silence: Why half of the world’s languages are in serious danger of dying out.

Linguists unite against English invasion.
What is different about the current dominance of English is that it is the first truly global language and it is spewing out words at a pace that other languages have no chance to compete with.

Language change and slang

Redefining definition.
One child, given the word erode, wrote, “Our family erodes a lot,” because the definition given was “eat out, eat away.”…Given these shortcomings of definitions, and the advantages of examples, why do we still cling to definitions?

Meep! The power of the meaningless.
News of the ban made for a moderately sized sensation, full of entertaining elements … a (possibly) overzealous principal (who also forwarded e-mails containing the word meep to the local police) …

Slang links warriors to home, front lines.
We may even have encountered, or experienced, the occasional SNAFU, for “Situation Normal: All (Fouled) Up.”But what on Earth is a “death blossom?” Or a “fobbit,” for that matter?

The scientific language of climate change.
One “believes” in faeries or leprechauns or angels. You do not “believe” in evolution or gravity or climate change.

Q and A: The death of languages.
Who says English is going to dominate forever? Last I checked, India and China are ascendant and the US is in decline.

Improve your English

Seven great English time expressions and idioms.

Common errors in English

His “Biological Cock”: on three decades of collecting Freudian slips.
What happens when an English professor becomes a psychologist?

Spot the mistakes.
The most common error spotted: ‘No outside food allowed.’

Things people say that I hate

Christmas at the White House failure.
Lame as a negative descriptor is problematic because it demeans those of us who are differently abled.

The literate architect.
Irregardless. Let the record show that this is not even a word.

7 words that must die in 2010.

Books, words, science and the history of language

Sign language puzzle solved.
…This means spoken English has more redundancy than the signed equivalent.

The 10 strangest books in the English language.

Today’s chortle.
Sarah Palin created a new market: the illiterate bestseller.

Mark Twain’s top ten writing tips.
7. Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The greatest hyperboles of all time.
On or about December 1910 human character changed.(Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1924).

Language Video: UK vs US English

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This post contains a weekly 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 and language change. Please contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include.

Language change and slang

The case for camel case.
I sincerely doubt that odd capitalization will result in our writing system falling into anarchy … Say what you will, but I think that iPhone looks a lot better than Iphone.

When a wrong word almost makes it right.
Malapropisms … it’s a common form of humour in drama: Bart Simpson still gets a laugh when he says he can do free legal work “pro boner.”

Can you guess the Word of the Year? #hint
“With ‘Twitter’ declared English’s most popular word and ‘unfriend’ taking the title of Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year, what else does social media have to conquer?”

Words that think for us.
No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” … As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it.
And a response: Thinking Words (part 1)
And the Language Log’s response to the response … Thinking about thinking words.

Improve your English

Ten funniest words in the English language.
It took us 3 years but we finally did it; we read the entire dictionary. (Don’t worry we won’t spoil the ending for you).

The excellent grammar of Tiger Woods.
But it gets even better. See those commas around his wife’s name in the second graf? He, or someone, obviously knows what an appositive is.

Things people say that I hate

Annoying grammar lesson.
I’m rather put out by the number of you who say that you don’t care about grammar rules. I mean, come on. Are you that way about math(s) when you balance your checkbooks?

Not fit for purpose? The jargon-laden language of politics.
We propose that cases of bad official language should be treated as ‘maladministration’, as for any other type of poor administration.

Journalism school language police.
The transition from World Wide Web site to Web site to website as a single uncapitalized word mirrors the development of other technological expressions which have tended to take unhyphenated forms as they become more familiar.

Common Errors in English

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds script finally spell-checked.
When Quentin Tarantino’s grammar-scalping script for Inglourious Basterds leaked last summer, “inglourious” and “basterds” weren’t the only words misspelled.

Snuckward ho!
The pattern in the NYT is less clear — did a new copy-editor come on board in the mid-to-late 1990s? — but still, snuck has been getting about a fifth of the action over the past few years.

Books, words, science and the history of language

Mad about English: The age-old language struggle.
I get afflicted with that crankiness when a television anchor describes a Chihuahua rescued from drowning as “very unique,” or a woman I scarcely know pronounces “forte” as “fortay”.

Idioms challenge.
Graphic Designers focused on matching typography while the Digital Artists made the artwork with high resolution images.

More on the hardest languages to learn – Indo-European languages.
The nine hardest languages to learn overall were: Mandarin, Hungarian, Finnish,  Polish,  Arabic, Hindi,  Icelandic, German and Swedish.

Researchers create cell phones for sign language.
Cornell researchers and colleagues have created cell phones that allow deaf people to communicate in sign language.

New artificial larynx does away with dreaded ‘robot voice’.
For decades, people with vocal cord problems could only hope to communicate in the cold, robotic voice provided by a mechanical larynx.

The economy of linguistic exchange in gaming culture.
I think that gaming language must be seen in the context of sub or youth cultural language. This means that specialized jargon has been developed for reasons other than purely technological.

10 most used imagined languages.

Twillionaire and twitticide.
Twitter-related portmanteaus (twitanteaus?) – users with a million followers, or those who abandon their tweeting.

2KX
An increasingly popular abbreviation for the year 2010.

Travelling to Bankok? Apparently this sign can be found at Bankok Suvarnabhumi International Airport.

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Global English

Millions of children missing out on education because of language barriers.
A report says that millions of children are missing out on an education because their schools teach in a language they don’t understand.

India falling behind China in English.
There may now be more people speaking English in China than in India, despite widespread use of the language in the South Asian country, a study has reported.

BBC launches mobile English language courses in Bangladesh.

Language debate, daycares don’t mix.
Workers called for amendments to Quebec’s contentious Bill 101 language law, in order to limit access to English daycares to children of parents educated in English in Canada. The changes would funnel more immigrant children into French-language.

Welsh language protester is jailed.
A Welsh language campaigner has been jailed for a month for his part in a protest campaign against high street stores that fail to provide bilingual services.

Citizenship language scam exposed.
Immigrants who don’t understand English have been able to buy language certificates that give them the right to settle in Britain.

First languages first, then English.
‘Partial or fragmented multiple languages spoken in the community result in the children becoming master of none of these languages, including English’.

Language change and slang

Word to your mother: Slang from the mouths of babes.
After the two of us visited a museum one day, he said goodbye and added, “I’ll knock you up tonight.” Who knew that meant he would telephone?

Words for potent jerks.
‘As a writer, you’re always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk’.

Languages appear to take on lives of their own.
Adult English-speakers, studies show, on average speak about 15,000 words a day and about 370 million in a lifetime.

Nitpickers’ journal exposes degrees of grammatical ignorance.
Dr Bernard Lamb, who lectured on genetics at Imperial College London for 40 years and is the president of the QES, compares British and overseas undergraduates’ command of English.

Deletionists.
Wikipedia editors who are quick to delete new or controversial postings. The two groups had been vying for control from early on in the site’s life, but the numbers suggest that the deletionists may have won.

Improve your English

Serial commas on the loose.
For what it’s worth, we agree with Mr. Hills. Unless you’re employed by an American newspaper or writing for publication in Canada, Australia, or the U.K., make the most of the serial comma.

Things people say that I hate

Strictly Come Dancing comes under fire for bad grammar.
‘Superfluous apostrophes SERIOUSLY irritate me, and I can’t believe the lovely people at the BBC can’t punctuate’.

Common Errors in English

8 Tips to help you master ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.
When it comes to noun forms, I bet on “effect,” because it is more common. But with the verb forms, I’ll wager on “affect,” because “chances are” I’ll be correct.

Top ten commonly confused words – with our compliments.
Of course, these are just a few of the hundreds of words in English that are easily confused because of similarities in sound and spelling.

Books, words, science and the history of language

iLingual: instantly speak another language through your iPhone

Volunteers log off as Wikipedia ages.
Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

‘I wasn’t sure if anyone would use it’.
The idea was to create a free encyclopedia on the internet, not written by experts (as was the case with Nupedia) but by members of the public.

Revised Google Book deal disappoints many.
Excluding foreign works from digital collection could hinder campus-based research, college librarians say.

USC professor creates an entire alien language for ‘Avatar’.
Frommer, a linguistics specialist, was brought in by “Avatar” writer-director James Cameron to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens who inhabit Pandora.

Words, gestures are translated by same brain regions.
‘Our results fit a longstanding theory which says that the common ancestor of humans and apes communicated through meaningful gestures and, over time, the brain regions that processed gestures became adapted for using words.’

Abracadabra! I win!
The big point is that fabulous new research from real life scholars (psychologists nonetheless, and they’re almost like scientists) proves that women should use particular words when yelling at their husbands.

Fantastic stop motion ad by the New Zealand Book Council.

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Global English

The decline of the English department.
In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent.

Google Ventures invests in English language learning startup EnglishCentral.
Users listen to popular video clips (like a speech by the president) and then repeat the words into a microphone; they are scored based on their pronunciation and syntax.

Common Errors in English

Britons place little importance on good spelling.
“Why not make a spelling test part of the admissions process? We’d solve the problem of university overcrowding in a flash.”
Similar from The Independent.

Language change and slang

Coined by the Bard: words invented by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is responsible for more new words in the English language than any other author, coining 1,500 neologisms by conservative estimate.

Notes from a love motel: ‘Curatism’.
A “curator” … I far prefer the legal definition of the word: “a guardian of a minor, lunatic, or other incompetent, especially with regard to his or her property”.

‘Rizotto,’ ‘selca’ make it into Korea’s contemporary dictionary.
Selca, a compound of “self” and “camera,” refers to taking a self portrait by turning the camera toward one’s face.

Things people say that I hate

The bartender knows all.
And ‘master mixologist’? Unless Yoda runs some bar somewhere I don’t know about…

Annoyance hit list: Like, whatever, you know?
‘Whatever’ has just topped a United States poll of the most overused and annoying words currently in use.

Reckless laziness ruining English.
‘To be honest with you…’ When a politician, or a car salesman, says this, you do wonder what words he would use if he was actually, and deliberately, being dishonest?

Books, words, science and the history of language.

Learning to speak: toddlers develop individualized rules for grammar, computer-based research shows.
Rather than adhering to the kinds of rules for English linguists have identified, the toddlers developed their own basic formulas for speaking.

‘Walking English’ from David Crystal makes for a merry trail: New in Paperback.
Readers will enjoy the serendipity throughout.

There once was a blogger who blogged.
‘An Olympian surge in my cranium, had me scout out a rhyme for uranium…’

Twain on Verbs.
‘…it was the Verb that lacked stability, it was the Verb that had no permanent opinion about anything, it was the Verb that was always dodging the issue and putting out the light and making all the trouble.’

Language Video

Kevin the Alien on English language.