Author Archives: Ingrid Tieken

NWO Humanities blog

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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Koffie’s vs koffies: how to find evidence of Dutch usage problems?

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

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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Effect an effect

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Kate Taylor’s first blogpost (Kate is another of my MA course Testing Prescriptivism students). In my experience there are three levels of knowledge regarding the uses of the words effect and affect: imagine these three levels as the tiers … Continue reading →

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Don’t wanna, don’t havta, ain’t gonna!

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

This is Cristina Cumpanasoiu’s first blog post, which she wrote as a student of my MA course Testing Prescriptivism: Slurring words together is common in literally every language. It’s kinda inevitable even for highly educated people. From poorly trained teenagers … Continue reading →

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Pietersen and Prescriptivism

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Here we have a blogpost by Ash Navrady, another student in my MA course Testing Prescriptivism: In the early months of 2014, the English Cricket Board made the controversial decision to ‘sack’ star batsman Kevin Pietersen in the aftermath of the disastrous Ashes … Continue reading →

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The indefinite pronoun in the news

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Joan Beal sent me a link from The Guardian Online on the indefinite pronoun. The topic seems to be getting a lot of interest these days: good. Read  what Rebecca Gowers has to say on the subject: We need to talk … Continue reading →

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Not The Nine o’Clock Parrot Sketch

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

And here is another blog post from one of the students from my MA course Testing Prescriptivism, this time from Richard Bond: ‘Not The Nine o’Clock News’ (NTNON) has a short skit that I found on YouTube. When I saw this clip … Continue reading →

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Congratulations, Rebecca Gowers …

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

… on the appearance of your revised and updated edition of Plain Words! We are delighted to have been given a copy, and look forward to reading it.

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More usage guides in 2014?

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

The present year promises to be a good year for usage guides. Later this month, Rebecca Gowers’s new edition of her great-grandfather’s Plain Words will be published, an e-version of David Crystal’s Who Cares about English Usage will come out, … Continue reading →

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Cross-cultural Prescriptivism

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

For his paper at the Cambridge Usage (Guides) Symposium on 26 and 27 June, Robert Ilson would welcome input from the readers of this blog. Elsewhere, he published  what he called a “plaidoyer” for a cross-cultural study of prescriptivism, and in … Continue reading →

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