Posts Tagged ‘language change’
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Posted by Jonathan Cole on September 09, 2009
The current UK release of the sci-fi / apartheid movie District 9 by Peter Jackson and Neil Blomkamp has brought South African English into the international spotlight. Stuck down near the bottom of the world, with a whole lot of animals, thousands of miles of coastline and not much between us and Antarctica [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on August 05, 2009
Some people get very upset about nouns being used as verbs. A recent row in the press centred on the verbal use of medal (How many of their athletes were medalled at the last Olympics?) but it turns out that this usage is at least as old as Thackeray. Which is hardly surprising, since forming [...]
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Posted by Susan Jellis on July 22, 2009
‘Can I get some more paper?’ ‘Yes, it’s on the table over there – help yourself.’
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This would be an unremarkable question and answer pattern but the colleague who was asked this question by several native speakers of British English recently was the invigilator of an exam and certainly did not give that response! The expectation [...]
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Posted by Jonathan Cole on May 14, 2009
Language changes faster than most of us can keep up with. The average person has a vocabulary of about 50,000 words, so with the much hyped arrival of the millionth word in the English language, we all have a lot of work to do. Let’s start with pwn. This is the second of two posts [...]
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Posted by Jonathan Cole on May 06, 2009
Have you come across the acronyms lol (laugh out loud) or brb (be right back) from texting or instant messaging? Perhaps you have lazily texted or typed C u 2mrw (see you tomorrow)? Are you a fan of the hugely popular Lol Cats (to the left) with their sometimes strange but often hilarious captioning language? [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 02, 2009
First, a little history to set the scene. We think of cricket as a very ‘English’ game, and nowadays it’s mainly played in parts of the former British empire: Australasia, the Indian subcontinent, South Africa, and the Caribbean. But its history is more complex. In a recent novel, Netherland, the protagonist is a Wall Street [...]
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Posted by Finn Kirkland on March 28, 2009
In the beginning there was the letter. Handwritten, focused, thought-provoking and sincere. Sentences would be considered, structured, and formulated in a way that could evoke any number of feelings and emotions, and it was the sort of piece that, when you finished writing, you felt content with the product in front of you: happy to [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 26, 2009
Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This is sometimes misquoted as “when a man is bored with London, he is bored with life” (and sometimes wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, but that’s another story). But what the great lexicographer definitely didn’t say was “when [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 24, 2009
Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – [...]
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