Author Archives: BtU Admin

Traditional and contemporary furniture

Posted on April 17, 2012 by BtU Admin

One of the polls a while ago asked your opinion about this sentence: Traditional and CONTEMPORARY furniture do not go well together. But when we were discussing this sentence during a project meeting the other day, we couldn’t really work … Continue reading →

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1st BtUnB Lunch Lecture

Posted on April 5, 2012 by BtU Admin

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Working with WordSmith Tools As the first in a regular lecture series we will be organising, the project Bridging the Unbridgeable offers a demonstration of the concordancing program WordSmith Tools, designed by Mike Scott from theUniversity of Liverpool. This program … Continue reading →

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Starting a sentence with and?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by BtU Admin

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In a recent blog, the question was raised when objections against sentences starting with a conjunction were first formulated, and one of the commenters, Steven Leefers, suggested it must have been around the Interbellum.  So thanks to Steven for sorting … Continue reading →

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Unlearning your mother tongue

Posted on March 15, 2012 by BtU Admin

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In a short story called “Mother Tongue” (2001), Ian McEwan writes about his efforts at acquiring standard English, a variety he had not learnt at home. As a result of his reading novels by Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene, [s]lowly, … Continue reading →

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New Usage Poll: Poll number 5

Posted on March 13, 2012 by BtU Admin

A new usage poll is available: it is the fifth one, which we temporarily skipped. Please fill it in and let us know what you think about older than me evenings  as a plain adverb different than the placement of … Continue reading →

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More on Dutch “hun hebben”

Posted on February 21, 2012 by BtU Admin

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Elsewhere in this blog we reported on the controversial use of hun hebben in Dutch today: it is widely used, possibly even spreading rapidly, but highly stigmatised at the same time. The pronoun hun in standard Dutch is an oblique form (“them”) or … Continue reading →

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List of disputed usages

Posted on February 14, 2012 by BtU Admin

One of the readers of this blog drew our attention to the fact that there is a list of disputed usages in Wikipedia. The list includes ain’t, less for fewer, like for as, which were all dealt with elsewhere in this … Continue reading →

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3 PhD positions for the project: we are reviewing the applications

Posted on January 31, 2012 by BtU Admin

The three PhD positions for the Bridging the Unbridgeable project that were announced earlier in this blog have now been advertised officially. You will find them on the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics website. For more information about the positions … Continue reading →

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Prescriptivism conference: Leiden 2013

Posted on January 20, 2012 by BtU Admin

As announced earlier in this blog, the next prescriptivism conference will be held in Leiden, on 12, 13 and 14 June 2013. A call for papers will be launched soon. Meanwhile, we are happy to inform our readers that we … Continue reading →

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Waterstone’s and their apostrophe

Posted on January 19, 2012 by BtU Admin

A few days ago, Marilyn Hedges, one of our contributors, left a comment to tell us that she had heard on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that Waterstone’s has decided to drop its apostrophe. As Marilyn summarised: The reason given … Continue reading →

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