Category Archives: usage features

More prescriptive commentary in the Smiley trilogy

Posted on November 20, 2020 by Ingrid Tieken

My reading of the last book of John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy, featuring George Smiley, Smiley’s People (1979), produced two more prescriptive comments. (There may have been more, but these caught my attention, possibly because both are in the HUGE … Continue reading →

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George Smiley a prescriptivist?

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Ingrid Tieken

Eighteen months or so ago I wrote a post about John le Carré, because I’d discovered that, like Kingsley Amis, Len Deighton and Ian McEwan, he too writes metalinguistic usage comments in his novels. My post then was about a … Continue reading →

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Just out: paper on flat adverbs by Morana Lukač and Ingrid Tieken

Posted on August 14, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

Congratulations, Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers, on the appearance of your book, and to Raymond Hickey in whose honour it was published! As for Morana and me, we’re very happy that it is out, and in my case, just in … Continue reading →

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An anachronism in The Mitford Murders

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

Being a fan of Nancy Mitford, and having read the Mitford sisters’ entire correspondence  (ed. Mosley 2007) as well as their biography by Mary Lovell (2001), I was naturally curious about The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes, the more so since … Continue reading →

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Describing Prescriptivism

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

Soon to appear (expected publication date: some time in September):  

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More complete?

Posted on April 21, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

In 2007, The Dutch Taaladviesdienst (a language advice service run by Genootschap Onze Taal)  published Taal top 100, a collection of the 100 most popular usage problems in Dutch, in the fields of spelling, grammar, lexis , punctuation and style. … Continue reading →

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These ones, those ones

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

Just finished my article “Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: Who’s in a usage guide and why” for a special issue with papers from Liv Walsh’s workshop In the Shadow of the Standard September last in Nottingham. … Continue reading →

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British or American – or doesn’t it matter?

Posted on October 28, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

I’d never have thought I would read a Young Adult novel, but I did, and here is why. At ICEHL-20, two months ago in Edinburgh, Jane Hodson presented a paper in the course of which she referred to The Knife of … Continue reading →

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Well, up to a point, Lord Copper!

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

I can’t even read read a Raymond Chandler novel without a pencil, I told Carol Percy when she was interviewing me for the Journal of English Linguistics (to appear in December this year). It is the fate of the linguist, … Continue reading →

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Hen and hun in Dutch. Or: How to Make a Usage Problem Go Away

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

This is Amos van Baalen’s second blogpost for last semester’s MA course Non-Standard English: Modern Dutch technically does not have a case system anymore. Remnants of this system occur in many set expressions, such as te allen tijde “at all … Continue reading →

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