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This is the title of an article by John Honey, published in 1995 in English Today. In the article Honey makes a plea for “agree[ing] upon [a] reasonable form of prescriptivism”, discussing as a case study the occurrence of pronoun … Continue reading
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In a very interesting paper called “BBC Style: A look at the style guides and language of BBC Radio News bulletins”, Anya Luscombe, from Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg (The Netherlands), analyses the views on a number of top “pet hates” among … Continue reading
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On the subject of what is called singular they (Everyone has their off-days) Mittins et al. write that Jane Austen “uniformly employs this usage”. The authors refer to S.A. Leonard’s Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage (1929) here, where we … Continue reading
Mind Your Language is a fantastic blog run by The Guardian on usage problems, the use of style guides and many related matters. Particularly the entries by David Marsh are well worth reading. Among the usage items dealt with we find: … Continue reading
Fowler is Funny by Paul Bennett, freelance copyeditor I have no religion except Fowlerism. I am a devout follower of Fowler, and when you make the decision to be devout, you must be prepared to defend your saviour. I have … Continue reading
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We would very much like to know whether readers consider the sentence in the title to this post problematic or not. It is of course – as aficionados will immediately recognise – from the Startrek trailer, and the construction in question is … Continue reading
Thanks to Paul Bennett for this one: And Dennis Baron drew an e-card for Henry Fowler on his 150th birthday in the Web of Language.
If you are not a native speaker English, like myself, these are difficult issues. According to Burchfield’s third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996), the one is characteristic of American English and the other of British English. (Fowler himself … Continue reading
A third usage poll has just been posted. “”May we have your votes, please?” And if you haven’t done the earlier polls, please do so too. Your feedback will be much appreciated again.
Under the first sense for heterogenous, the OED writes: A less correct form of heterogeneous adj. (In mod. use prob. repr. the pronunc. /hɛtəˈrɒdʒɪnəs/ given by some speakers to heterogeneous: cf. homogenous adj. (homogeneous adj. ¶).) Labelling the word as … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 