Category Archives: usage features

Whom and Len Deighton (and like)

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

There have already been several posts in this blog about the disappearance of whom, and also about prescriptivism in English literature. Here is one that combines both. Funeral in Berlin, which I came across when looking for the third part … Continue reading →

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Something must have went on

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Viktorija Kostadinova

The first time I read about have went as a usage problem was in the context of what 18th century prescriptivists wrote about it: Robert Lowth and Noah Webster, two 18th (and, in the case of Webster, 19th) century grammarians, both … Continue reading →

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A Word on Asphalt

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Inge Otto

Did you ever see the word “ashfault” in a newspaper, book, article ­– or anywhere else at all? Well, until recently I was unaware of this word’s existence (too). It was only when I read Paul Brian’s usage guide Common … Continue reading →

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Is Fay Weldon having us on?

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

It’s an occupational hazard, I suppose, but I find it hard to read a novel without noticing particular usage features. So while reading Fay Weldon‘s The Heart of the Country (1987) last week, I stumbled over this sentence, as it has an … Continue reading →

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Jeremy Clarkson on car journalists and “generic he”

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Inge Otto

Jeremy Clarkson, whom many of us might know from the British television show TopGear, in his column of October 2013 worries about things other than cars. Right. What could that be? you might think. Well, from the outside, most of … Continue reading →

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Usage problems, usage questions?

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

In the under-water screen to this blog, we can see how (new) people got to our blog, what they are interested in, and also what they are seeking usage advice on. The most frequent usage questions that people have recently … Continue reading →

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Traditional and contemporary furniture

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

One of our readers asked about the collocation of traditional and contemporary, as in the example above. The question was item 4 in our first usage poll, which we carried out a while ago (but which is still open). It was … Continue reading →

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Between you and I in a 17th-century love story

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

Reading a selection of journal entries in Bridget Cusack’s Everyday English 1500-1700 (EUP, 1998) I came across what we classify as between you and I in one of the texts, and not once but twice. The writer of the journal is Roger … Continue reading →

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Thusly now a word?

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

One of the things that struck me is that many readers of this blog seem to have found their way to us as a result of searching the internet for the word thusly. The blog statistics for today, for instance, … Continue reading →

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Jane Austen and imply and infer

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

K.C. Phillipps, in his book Jane Austen’s English (1970: 51), identified a usage problem in Jane Austen’s language: “The one usage to which the [sic] purist might object is infer in the sense of ‘imply’, though the NED [now OED] (infer … Continue reading →

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