Category Archives: usage features

Verbal hygiene at Mr Kipling’s

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

I love Mr Kipling’s little Bramley apple pies, advertised as “exceedingly good cakes”. So far so grammatically good, and good they are. But when buying them this summer during our holidays in England, we also spotted Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good … Continue reading →

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A very timely piece on Dutch “literally”

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

Thank you, Ewoud Sanders, for choosing to write on Dutch literally just this weekend. A very welcome piece for my comparative paper on the English, Dutch and German usage guide traditions later this week. We’ve written on this topic (from … Continue reading →

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Is different from really correct?

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

The reference is to the title of an article from 1 January 2022 on the Guardian online, by subeditor Susan McDonald. With an amazing 4194 comments in three days, the opportunity to add another one is now unfortunately closed. I … Continue reading →

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A very unlikely British phrase

Posted on December 29, 2021 by Ingrid Tieken

Watching the final episode of the BBC mini-series A Very British Scandal last night I was struck by the Duke of Argyll saying “This battle between you and I …”. It would have been highly unlikely for a man of … Continue reading →

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Language columns in major newspapers

Posted on October 27, 2021 by Ingrid Tieken

It’s great to come across language columns in newspapers like The Economist and, more recently, the New York Times. It is even greater if they deal with aspects of prescriptivism, and linguists’ as well as the general public’s reactions to … Continue reading →

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Roadkill’s scriptwriters

Posted on October 22, 2021 by Ingrid Tieken

For a paper I’m writing on the use of who/whom I’m trying to get in touch with the scriptwriters of Roadkill, a British political thriller series that was broadcast in the UK and the US towards the end of 2020 … Continue reading →

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That if a usage problem in English?

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Ingrid Tieken

Two of my colleagues at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics are working on the collocation of dat “that” and als “if” in sentences like Hij dacht dat als hij drukte, het luikje open zou gaan (“He thought that if he pushed, … Continue reading →

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Breaking the who/whom rule in English literature

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Ingrid Tieken

For a paper I’m planning to write on the breaking of prescriptive rules by literary authors for characterisation purposes, I’m looking for specific examples of the breaking of the who/whom rule. I have several examples of them already, and have … Continue reading →

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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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