Category Archives: news

Paper on prescriptivism by Anne Curzan

Posted on December 9, 2011 by BtU Admin

At the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, one of the plenary papers will be on prescriptivism. The speaker is Anne Curzan, from the University of Michigan, and her paper will be called “Prescriptivism: More Than Descriptivism’s Foil”. The … Continue reading →

Posted in news | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Bridging the unbridgeable on Facebook

Posted on October 21, 2011 by BtU Admin

We have just launched the Facebook page of the project. Follow the link on the right to visit the page and feel free like us and join our new community of friends to help bridge the unbridgeable!

Posted in news | Tagged | Leave a comment

The French Academy goes interactive

Posted on October 14, 2011 by BtU Admin

Earlier this week, an article appeared in The Independent called “Language watchdog goes interactive to teach French to the French”. It reports on the fight against English influence on French by the Academie Française. Words criticised are stresser, as in “C’était stressant … Continue reading →

Posted in news | Tagged | 1 Comment

Refusing to condemn “ain’t”

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Ingrid Tieken

This week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review includes an essay by Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist from the University of California (Berkeley), called “When a dictionary could outrage“. Nunberg compares the recent decision of the Oxford English Dictionary to adopt … Continue reading →

Posted in news, usage features | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Conference on prescriptivism

Posted on September 20, 2011 by BtU Admin

The next conference on Prescriptivism will be held in Leiden, from 12 – 14 June 2013. It will be hosted by the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Previous conferences took place in Sheffield, UK (2003), Ragusa, Sicily (2006) and Toronto … Continue reading →

More Galleries | Tagged , | 1 Comment

New edition of The King’s English by Kingsley Amis

Posted on September 12, 2011 by BtU Admin

The title of this usage guide was obviously inspired by its famous ancestor published in 1881, by George Washington Moon. As for the title of Amis’s book, being called “the King” was “a nickname he tolerated”, according to his son … Continue reading →

More Galleries | Tagged | Leave a comment