In Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding (2011), one brief interaction between two characters is the scene of a linguistic inside joke. Pella Affenlight is arguing with her father, the President of Westish College as well as a … Continue reading
Last week, I was fervently combing the earliest volumes of The English Journal, hoping to track down some articles about usage guides and problems for the database. After a while, just when I had figured that Volume 10, Issue 8 … Continue reading
Earlier this month, March fourth to be precise, National Grammar Day was celebrated in the U.S. I like to think was the impetus for many dinners of punctuation-meatloaf (or walnut loaf for the veggie punctuation partiers among us). The day … Continue reading
In his book Spoilt rotten: the toxic cult of sentmentality (2011), Theodore Dalrymple writes: “a friend of mine who teaches history at Oxford is specifically enjoined by the guidelines provided for markers [of papers, exams] by the authorities not to mark … Continue reading
Next academic year, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is offering an MA course on prescriptivism at the University of Leiden. The course, which will be called “Testing Prescriptivism”, is part of the MA track English Language and Linguistics, but is open … Continue reading
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On 10 April, Dr. Anya Luscombe from University College Roosevelt (Middelburg, The Netherlands), will give a guest lecture at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics. The lecture will be from: 1.15 to 3 pm, and will take place in … Continue reading
The creation of a database of English usage guides and usage problems: the Hyper Usage Guide of English, or HUGE-database, is one of the sub-projects within Bridging the Unbridgeable. It is the first database to combine more than two hundred years of usage advice … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 