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Author Archives: Ingrid Tieken
Season’s Greetings
We wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – hoping to receive as many comments from you as ever! To end with a “fun fact”: did you know that most Christmas cards feature animals? And so … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
Sexy usage advice
Comma Sutra proved my husband’s favourite St Nicholas present this year. Good for me, because I was the one who bought it for him. The reason I did is that it neatly combines our respective research interests – mine in usage … Continue reading
Ingrid Tieken interviewed by Paul Brians
Last week, Paul Brians interviewed Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade about her work in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project and about the book she is writing on usage guides as a text type. A podcast of the interview was published on … Continue reading
Happy birthday, Paul Brians!
Another one of our usage guide writer’s birthdays! Paul Brians is the author of Common Errors in English Usage, published in 2003, one of the usage guides in our HUGE database. Paul also has a website, a blog, a daily calendar (for … Continue reading
Posted in biography, news
2 Comments
Hoary witticisms and other prescriptivist jokes
In going through our usage guides, we occasionally come across linguistic jokes – not terribly funny, admittedly, but they apparently appeal to writers on usage. And they have done so from the earliest days of the usage guide tradition onwards, … Continue reading
Posted in usage guide
Tagged flat adverbs, Vizetelly, Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
1 Comment
Happy birthday, Harry Blamires!
Harry Blamires (b. 1916) is the oldest living usage guide writer in our HUGE database, and what is more, he has turned 99 today! Harry Blamires wrote several books on English, such as English in Education (of which I was told by … Continue reading
Nucular a British usage problem too
I always thought nucular (for nuclear: hard to pronounce!) was an American usage problem. Though I must admit I had never heard of it until 2009, when I was at a conference on prescriptivism in Toronto, organised by Carol Percy, … Continue reading
Posted in usage features
Tagged Caroline Taggart, Greenbaum & Whitcut, Hilary Mantel, nucular, Robert Burchfield
1 Comment
Taggart vs. Pinker: and the winner is …
I’d really like to be able to find out how well “our” usage guides, those in the HUGE database that is, have been selling over the years. This is confidential information, I was recently told by the firm handling the estate of … Continue reading
Andrew Delahunty
Please allow me introduce Andrew Delahunty to you – at least, I assume this is him. I found this picture on a website called lovereading4kids, where Andrew is described as “a lexicographer and writer on language with many years’ experience … Continue reading
Early usage guide writer a talkshow host
Hardly any news if the information can be readily found on the Internet, but for me it was: Bergen Evans (1904-1978), the author of A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) together with his sister Cornelia , hosted a talkshow on language. I … Continue reading
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