Posts Tagged ‘vocabulary’
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Posted by Beth Penfold on December 16, 2010
Christmas is a big event in the UK. The Americans have Thanksgiving and the Dutch have Sinterklaas – but we love our Christmas! One potent symbol of this festival is the Christmas tree and as I open my box of decorations to put on the tree, I get to use some of my favourite Christmassy words. [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on December 02, 2010
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 [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on November 09, 2010
Every year on the 5th November, people in Britain commemorate the Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt by Guy Fawkes and his gang to blow up the Houses of Parliament. We celebrate this lucky escape by burning an effigy of Fawkes on a large bonfire and setting off fireworks to imitate the explosion, had it happened. As I [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on September 16, 2010
Crikey! The Huffington Post’s recent article entitled The 11 Longest Words in the English Language sure stretched MY linguistic talents! I do wonder what the point of such words is though. I mean, if you can’t say the thing, let alone remember how to spell it, what’s the point? I guess the scientific ones need to have all [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on September 10, 2010
A little game I like to play when seeking inspiration, respite, the meaning of life etc, is to go into the Macmillan Dictionary and start slowly typing in random letters. The dictionary throws up search suggestions and I look down these lists until I find an interesting or unusual (or rude!) word, then I Google it. You [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on September 08, 2010
You might be surprised to find out that there was a dictionary of slang published over half a century before Johnson’s mighty effort. And this year, from the bowels of the Bod, comes the republishing of The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699. At the time it was first published, the aim of the dictionary [...]
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Posted by Alexander Dron on May 31, 2010
On the final day of Russian English month, freelance translator and interpreter Alexander Dron shares some of his experiences as interpreter with us. Thank you for all of you who have contributed to Russian English month! ___________ My most recent ordeal on TV was a press conference following a meeting of European finance ministers which [...]
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Posted by Sarah McKeown on March 03, 2010
One of my favourite quotes is by Virginia Woolf: ‘Language is wine upon the lips’ she said to her husband Leonard one evening, over a bottle of Blue Nun. What a lovely sentiment. Profound, enigmatic, erotic. Note what she did not say. She did not say: ‘Language is Dr Pepper upon the lips.’ Woolf made [...]
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Posted by Sarah McKeown on February 08, 2010
There was me, that is Sarah, sat in front of the puter in my woolly toofles, after a hard day’s rabbiting, fagged and in need of a bit of spatchka, trying to gather together my messels and make up my rassoodock as to what slovos to write for this bloggywog. And I must confess, O [...]
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Posted by Dizraeli on January 30, 2010
And so we come to the end of our United Kingdom English focus. Rowan Sawday (Dizraeli), who kicked everything off with his 21st Century Flux rap, wraps the month up with a post in answer to the question: What’s your English? Thank you to all guest authors – English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh– for interesting, [...]
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