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One of my most delightful discoveries when I was looking for first quotations from eighteenth-century authors in the OED was that Fanny Burney was cited as the first user of ain’t. The source was Evelina, her first novel published in … Continue reading
This is a question Jimmie Fane, a character in Kingsley Amis’s novel The Biographer’s Moustache (1996), asks his biographer Gordon Scott-Thomson. The question relates to the word often, and he asks: How do you pronounce O, F, T, E, N? Sounding the … Continue reading
How old is could of, should of, would of, the controversial issue reported on elsewhere in this blog? On reading the proofs for my chapter in the second edition of The Oxford History of English, edited by Lynda Mugglestone and … Continue reading
Elsewhere in this blog I reported on the first quotation from the OED for the term “flat adverb”: 1871 J. Earle Philol. Eng. Tongue vii. 361 The Flat Adverb is simply a substantive or an adjective placed in an adverbial position. (This … Continue reading
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For a paper I’m writing in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project I’m doing a survey into attitudes to particular usage problems. For this pilot study, I’m collecting texts in which people express their opinions to such usage … Continue reading
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Reading Hoffman’s Honger (1990) by Leon de Winter, a Dutch writer (b. 1954) who divides his time between living in The Netherlands and Los Angeles, I was struck by the apostrophe in the title of this novel. Dutch usage of the apostrophe … Continue reading
Today, 22 April 2012, is Modern English Usage day: according to Jenny McMorris, in her biography of H.W. Fowler called The Warden of English (OUP 2001), Modern English Usage was published on 22 April 1926. The Warden of English is a fantastic book to read, written in … Continue reading
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Thanks to Google for suggesting the right spelling if you happen – quite understandably – to search for “Bridging the Unbridgable”. No such help for typesetters or spelling correctors (quality newspaper NRC’s? or magazine L’Officiel’s?) missing the absence of the intermediate e … Continue reading
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R.W. Burchfield (1923-2004) was not only the author of the third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage – which Wikipedia labels as a “controversial, substantially rewritten and less prescriptivist” version of the book: he was also responsible for the second Supplement of the … Continue reading
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Peter Tiersma, in a chapter called “The Legal Lexicon”, notes: In American English, shall has become virtually obsolete, so that the sole future modal verb is will (Tiersma 1999:105). Is this indeed the case? Do copy editors allow “I will” … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 