Posts Tagged ‘gender’
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 18, 2012
The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had [...]
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Posted by Dan Clayton on September 05, 2011
Gender & English has proven to be a popular topic so we’ve decided to continue the discussion for another week before switching to a new area (more on that next week). English teacher, Research Fellow and blogger Dan Clayton returns with a guest post on the differences between male and female communication. ______________ “It has [...]
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Posted by Aneta Naumoska on September 01, 2011
Gender English month continues with a guest post by Aneta Naumoska, a Lector of Contemporary English Language at the “Blaze Koneski” Faculty of Philology in Skopje, Macedonia. Aneta’s first book, Gender Marking in the English Language, was published in December 2010. Her particular interests lie in the field of Sociolinguistics. She is also an avid [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on August 22, 2011
In a recent post about the role of dictionaries in matters of language and gender, Michael Rundell wrote that they “shouldn’t take sides in any area of language use” but that “in some cases this is unavoidable”. Dictionaries record how language is used, so they can’t simply ignore sexist and discriminatory usages – or new [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on August 15, 2011
The recent riots in England led to some debate over language, most notably over what to call the people rioting. The BBC was criticised for continuing to use the word protesters for a few days after the term had become inappropriate. The broadcaster later admitted it had made a mistake; Fran Unsworth, BBC News head [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on August 10, 2011
In a recent comment, Stan mentioned a newpaper headline about a ‘missing girl’ who was in fact a 30-year-old woman. As he pointed out, ‘there’s no way “missing boy” would have been used to describe a man of 30’ – and this is more or less the message given in the Macmillan Dictionary’s entry for [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on August 03, 2011
August is dedicated to gender English here on the blog, and we kick off another month of lively discussion with a post by regular guest blogger Stan Carey on the topic of gender and pronouns. ___________ English has long had trouble with gender and pronouns. The lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun has inspired [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on November 18, 2010
What’s your view on gender in language, and how it affects learning? English stands out from other European languages by not have gendered nouns, so the city is not feminine as it is in, say French and Spanish (la cité / la ciudad), and nor is the country masculine (le pays / el país). We [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 11, 2010
Stan Carey’s post yesterday was a nice reminder of how a word or phrase can suddenly gain widespread currency simply as a result of fashion. And as with any trend, the kudos gained by the user declines in inverse proportion to the number of users – so that in the end the phrase becomes an [...]
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Posted by Jamie Keddie on May 18, 2009
In the English class, teachers can make use of internet search engines to answer students’ linguistic queries such as: “Which is more common – look after yourself or take care of yourself?” In the following pie chart, figures refer to the number of Google hits obtained by running a web search of these two items: [...]
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