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Category Archives: usage features
Another prescriptivist joke
For a paper I’m giving at the LUCL Colloquium on 2 November, I started to analyse the response I got to the Attitudes Survey I have been carrying out since early May this year. The response, btw, has been truly … Continue reading
That was literally awesome
All things come to an end. No matter how hard we try, but ultimately we cannot prevent them from disappearing or not fitting our needs anymore. Take, for example, shoes. As a kid I had awesome shoes with blinking lights … Continue reading
A healthy or healthful debate
Autumn has arrived and the battle against catching colds has officially begun. The recent weather with its cold winds and heavy rain showers makes it even more difficult to fight off colds. Vitamins and staying dry seem to be the … Continue reading
Could of/should of and Canadian English
Could of/should of are older than we think: elsewhere in this blog I reported on their occurrence already in 18th-century English. It is also the feature in the Attitudes Survey that calls for the most comments, mostly negative (very negative!) … Continue reading
Learning English the Warrell Way
This image is of a cover of a little booklet – unpaginated, but containing 12 pages – which the Bridging the Unbridgeable project was given yesterday. Brief though it is, it is nevertheless relevant for our research, as it includes … Continue reading
Posted in usage features
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Snuck in Canadian English?
If snuck is very common in British and American English (see elsewhere on this blog), how about Canadian or other Englishes? I found the following example in Margaret Atwood‘s The Blind Assassin (2000): People snuck off to Stratford or London … Continue reading
On snuck and sneaked
Mesthrie et al. write on p. 23 of their book Introducing Sociolinguistics (2nd ed., 2009, Edinburgh University Press, that different verb forms are regarded as standard in the UK than in the US. One example they is give is snuck/sneaked, … Continue reading
Posted in usage features
Tagged British vs American usage, Bryan Garner, Jennifer Garner, snuck
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Worried about Americanisms? Apparently so!
One of our readers sent us a link to an item from the BBC News Magazine, from 20 July last year, on Americanisms. It is well worth looking at. Thanks, Katherine! The article reads that thousands responded: any additions from … Continue reading
Posted in news, usage features
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8th usage poll
In case you were worried that we were no longer interested in your views on usage, here, at last, is our 8th usage poll. It includes items 36-40 from the survey by Mittins et al. (1970). As before, we are … Continue reading
Prescriptivist joke
I heard this one last night from my (British) brother-in-law: There used to be only three vowels before You and I. Any other such jokes? In English or any other language?
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