Coming back from our summer holidays, I’m steadily working my way through the backlog of newspapers (primarily NRC Handelsblad). One of the things that stuck was something I read in a column by language historian and journalist Ewoud Sanders, from 25 June. … Continue reading
Many forms are being returned for my attitudes survey, so thanks to everyone filling them in, and helping with my research. Particularly the members of the University of the Third Age in the UK, who have been responding in great … Continue reading
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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
