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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
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The previous post quoted an example from Lindley Murray’s English Grammar to illustrate that restrictive relative clauses are not separated from the antecedent by a comma: A man who is of a detractory spirit, will misconstrue … (1795:164). Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw, a specialist … Continue reading
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Elsewhere in this blog (search for: “A which hunt”), I referred to the different prescriptions for usage of which and that in British and American English. The American advice to “use that before a restrictive clause and which before everything else” suggests that that is … Continue reading
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One of my (British) colleagues the other day mentioned that his sixteen-year-old daughter was very much surprised to learn that of in could of was not a preposition but an auxiliary verb. (For clarity’s sake, the girl’s father is a linguist and … Continue reading
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… is the title of a book by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum, published in 2006. Based on their blog Language Log, it contains items on English usage but also topics that “might provoke a good laugh or draw … Continue reading
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I’m currently reading James Pennebaker’s book The Secret Life of Pronouns (Bloomsbury Press, 2011): fascinating and intriguing, and I find myself nervously watching my own pronoun use as I write (too many first person pronouns already in this first sentence to … Continue reading
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One of our readers mentioned Jane Austen in relation to an earlier post on the recommendation to avoid try and in favour of try to. Searching the novels for “try and” I found one instance, in Emma: I shall try … Continue reading
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… one of our readers asked a few days ago. “Where was he working when the National Council of Educational Standards asked him to write The Language Trap? Was he an academic?” she asked. What we know about John Honey … Continue reading
One of my colleagues asked me the following question: Do you happen to know when the ‘rule’ of not beginning a sentence with a conjunction was formulated? This is just the sort of question that we would be able to answer … Continue reading
