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Monthly Archives: April 2014
Pedants and Perpetrators: or, language, power and the dangers of simplificitation
Yesterday, the website of The Guardian posted an article on the members of the Idler Academy’s Bad Grammar Awards‘ shortlist. The bad grammar perpetrated by those on the shortlist contained a number of the ‘old chestnuts’ such as the use of … Continue reading
Posted in news
Tagged Bad Grammar Awards, Deborah Tannen, Jeremy Paxman, pedantry, power, The Guardian, The Idler
1 Comment
Pietersen and Prescriptivism (ctd.)
In an earlier blogpost, Ash Navrady commented on how the star cricketer Kevin Pietersen was sacked by the English Cricket Board (ECB). Here follows another blogpost, in which Ash again focusses on an issue of prescriptivism, in this case the … Continue reading
The turbulent times of hopefully
Below follows Anna Yuryeva’s first blog post. She’d be pleased with your comments. Two years ago, in April 2012, the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook published a tweet, which was followed by a virtual tsunami of criticism from grammar enthusiasts: “Hopefully, you … Continue reading
What makes a usage guide?
During the construction of the HUGE database, I have been thinking about the genre of usage guides a lot for the simple, practical purpose of determining which titles would be put in the database, and which would not. Edmund Weiner asked … Continue reading
Posted in polls and surveys, usage guide
Tagged dictionaries, Edmund Weiner, genre, Style Guides
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The Correct and Improving Major Byron F. Caws
This is Richard Bond’s second blog post. The Story So Far – At Dr. Johnson’s House in London there is a plaque that reads “Castigavit et emendavit” (“he corrected and improved“) suggesting that these are H. W. Fowler’s words in recognition … Continue reading
Maar is het fout? (But is it wrong?)
Here is Annemarie Walop‘s second blog post. While browsing on the internet a few weeks ago, I found a very interesting article on the website of Dutch quality newspaper De Volkskrant about the Dutch coordinating conjunction maar (“but”). The article is … Continue reading
NWO Humanities blog
NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the funding agency of our project, recently started a Humanities blog. They asked us to write a couple of blog posts for them, and the first one appeard online yesterday. Though the post … Continue reading
Yagoda’s Language Madness
March Madness describes a very American phenomenon: the NCAA college basketball tournament. In this tournament college teams compete against each other and by winning move on to the next round. This process is often visualised in so-called brackets, which apparently … Continue reading
Posted in polls and surveys, usage features
Tagged Ben Yagoda, language madness, pet peeves, polls, sins against language
1 Comment
Koffie’s vs koffies: how to find evidence of Dutch usage problems?
Marten van der Meulen is the next student in my MA course Testing Prescriptivism to write a blog post: While recently investigating a piece on the greengrocer’s apostrophe, I read an earlier piece on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog about … Continue reading
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