Monthly Archives: August 2014

Farewell to Geoffrey Leech

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Morana Lukač

This month, Geoffrey Leech, the eminent Professor and the founder of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, passed away. Due to his major contributions to the fields of corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics, as well … Continue reading →

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Help us out: journal suggestions?

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Emily Maas

We are looking for scholarly secondary works dealing with prescriptivism/descriptivism with an emphasis on usage guides and usage problems for the HUGE-database. So far, we have looked at journals such as American Speech, English Studies, English Today, The English Journal … Continue reading →

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You Guys or Y’all?

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Emily Maas

Okay, you guys, I’ve got a little more written… are you ready? —Joey Tribbiani (Friends) To me it seems as if plural you is a little bit lost these days. Sitcoms and television series such as Friends, The Big Bang Theory, South … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized, usage features | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Read all about it! Our third feature in English Today

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Morana Lukač

In the latest issue of English Today I briefly address the history of the possessive apostrophe, the most notorious punctuation mark in the English language. Here are some interesting facts from the article: Did you know that the apostrophe was first … Continue reading →

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No hard language feelings?

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Carmen Ebner

The use of English, or rather its misuse, has often caused the one or the other to throw up his or her (or their?) hands in horror. Last month I attended the English Grammar Day at the British Library in … Continue reading →

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Merriam Webster’s lexicographers

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) is unusual among the usage guides I have seen in that the work isn’t by a single author, such as Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) or Kingley Amis’s The King’s English (1997). The work … Continue reading →

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Begging the question?!

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

During the past few weeks, two readers of this blog commented on Jasper Spierenburg’s use of the expression “begging the question“. As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with it, so why the comments? To check my (non-native … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged | 10 Comments

Usage guides and the Book Club Associates

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Yesterday, I wrote a post about my discovery of Harry Blamires’s usage guide, called The Cassell Guide to Common Errors in English (1998). The publisher is mentioned as BCA, which as I now know, thanks to Tim Waller, stands for Book Club … Continue reading →

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Who is Harry Blamires?

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

There, I’ve done it again: I found another usage guide at our local (Dutch!) charity shop Het Warenhuis. How did the book end up in the Netherlands? There is no ownership inscription unfortunately, so we won’t know who the former … Continue reading →

Posted in biography, usage guide | Tagged | 8 Comments

Can ‘Cheers!’ be inappropriate? The story of email sign-offs

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Morana Lukač

In one of our previous posts Ingrid Tieken wrote about her analysis of commonly used email sign-offs she found while going through her inbox. (To find out more about the differences she found between American, British and non-native email authors, … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments