Author Archives: Ingrid Tieken

“Basically … rather good”

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Just decided to check up on the reception of Simon Heffer’s new (well, two years old by now) usage guide called Simply English, and found that Ben East, in The Guardian, described it as “basically … rather good”.  Interesting, in view … Continue reading →

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Frank Sinatra and prescriptivism

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

This summer, driving through France, one of the CDs we played was “The best of Frank Sinatra”. Singing along with his very popular “That’s Life” (1966), my attention was suddenly caught by his use of laying for lying: “Each time I find myself … Continue reading →

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9 December – Life after HUGE? Registration now closed

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Registration for the symposium is now closed. Should you wish to attend the symposium after all, please leave a comment, and we will see what we can do. Below, you will find the preliminary programme for the symposium Life after HUGE? … Continue reading →

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How do sticklers react to linguistic findings?

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Lingyun Lai’s second blogpost: Sometimes, grammar handbooks and usage guides address similar usage issues, but their conclusions are not always the same. Nowadays, quite a few grammar references are based on corpus linguistics, and many such descriptive findings disaffirm … Continue reading →

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Forever dangling? The unstoppable dangling participle under scrutiny

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Ina Huttenga’s second blog post: The dangling participle is a pervasive structure in the English language. These “misrelated” modifiers have been used throughout English language history, but they seem to have become problems only recently, in the 20th … Continue reading →

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Write it Right: A very pedantic usage guide

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Madeleine Ibes’s second blog post: Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American short story author, journalist and satirist who authored books like The Devil’s Dictionary (1906/1909), which contained definitions like this one for grammar: “A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for … Continue reading →

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You should not borrow that!

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Sara Sánchez-Molina Santos’s second blog post: Should we blame on language users the borrowing of words from other languages? Are speakers mistaken when they borrow words that are apparently already present in the language? Is this a new phenomenon? … Continue reading →

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Your Top 5 of grammatical errors in English?

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Hielke Vriesendorp is a research master student of Linguistics at Leiden, who is trying to collect data for his paper for Ingrid Tieken’s MA course Testing Prescriptivism. To this end, he compiled a brief survey asking about people’s Top 5s of most … Continue reading →

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I’m good, I’m fine

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

About a year ago, Morana and I posted a survey on this blog to try and collect data about attitudes to the flat adverb. We wanted to use the data for a paper we were writing at the time. But … Continue reading →

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Whether or not?

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

My colleague Ton van der Wouden would like to know if whether or not  is a usage problem – or not. He noticed an enormous increase in usage (Google Books) over the last eighty years or so. As far as I … Continue reading →

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