This post contains a weekly selection of links related to English language today. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting related websites. A new weekly review post will be posted every Friday. Please contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include.
News
One nation under jargon.
‘Why do we have to have ‘coterminous stakeholder engagement’ when we could just talk to people instead?’
Le buzz over new French dictionary.
‘The French are particularly keen on borrowing English words ending in -ing. The problem is that they often use them in a different way from English’.
Five-month-old babies prefer their own languages and shun foreign accents.
The most misspelled words in the English language.
Blogs and columnists
Too many euphemisms have entered our lexicon.
‘Much of this rancor could be assuaged if only there was another word to celebrate the different but “special,” loving, caring commitment and legal union of “same sex” couples. Civil unionage just does not pass muster’.
World’s many languages are dying out; can we stop it?
‘As each language disappears, so does knowledge built up over centuries, some of which may be useful to the world. It’s like the burning of the library at Alexandria, which destroyed most of the learning of the ancient world’.
Big, fancy words.
‘The director of Web analytics shared some intriguing data with me: a list of the words that had been looked up most often by Times readers so far this year’.
The right word.
‘Most persons simply fail to recognize that there are very few true synonyms in the language, no matter what the dictionary may insist’.
Linguistic numismatics.
Historical linguistics
Language continuity in Europe.
Grammar, errors and linguistic heavy lifting
Different to and different from?
Excrescence and anaptyxis in epenthesis meets LOL cats.
Something light after the above link. A funny clip which I am justifying linking by its tenuous relationship to sign language and … oh, just watch it!
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