Posts Tagged ‘word origins’

  • Trick or treat?

    Posted by on October 31, 2011

    Today is Halloween. All over North America, in the UK, and in other countries, children will be knocking on the doors of nearby houses saying “Trick or Treat!” in the hope that they will be given sweets (if in the UK) or candy (in North America). And people will put candles inside grinning, hollowed out [...]

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  • Getting cute about gender

    Posted by on August 08, 2011

    A recent study used a Twitter-based corpus to examine the relationship between language and gender. One of the things it looked at was “gender-skewed words” – words used by one gender more than the other. Among the words used predominantly by girls and women were: feel, love, hair, sleep, wait, cute, yummy, totally, aww, ugh, [...]

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  • Two short legs and a silly point: learn (about) English through cricket. Part 2: Origins

    Posted by 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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