Monthly Archives: January 2016

The descriptive backlash

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Morana Lukač

Last month The Independent published a story featuring an email etiquette rule by Jonathan Tisch, a hotel magnate. According to Mr. Tisch, the one word you should never use to start emails is “I”. Referring to mentors, teachers and your own … Continue reading →

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The Age of Prescriptivism

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Last week, at the symposium  The Effects of Prescriptivism in Language History organised at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics by Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke van der Wal, I presented a paper called The Age of Prescriptivism. For the paper … Continue reading →

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Try and, only, split infinitives, dangling participles

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

(If this is your first time on this blog: please fill in the acceptability survey below. Thank you!) What do these features have in common? That is something Carmen Ebner and I are going to figure out in the article we … Continue reading →

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Please help us with our usage polls!

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

If you can spare us a little of your time, and if you haven’t done so already, please take our fifth usage poll. If you do so, we will be able to study the difference in acceptability compared between when Mittins … Continue reading →

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Drownded: read drowned

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Perhaps the most interesting irregular verb form I found in my analyse of the usage guides in HUGE (for a paper I’m giving next week on the topic) is drownded. The only usage guide in the HUGE database that mentions … Continue reading →

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Happy birthday, Janet Whitcut!

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Though none of us in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project has ever met Janet Whitcut, her work is nevertheless very important to us. Janet is the author, together with Sidney Greenbaum, of The Longman Guide to English Usage (1988). Jointly, they … Continue reading →

Posted in news, usage guide | Tagged | 3 Comments