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One of my most delightful discoveries when I was looking for first quotations from eighteenth-century authors in the OED was that Fanny Burney was cited as the first user of ain’t. The source was Evelina, her first novel published in … Continue reading
This is a question Jimmie Fane, a character in Kingsley Amis’s novel The Biographer’s Moustache (1996), asks his biographer Gordon Scott-Thomson. The question relates to the word often, and he asks: How do you pronounce O, F, T, E, N? Sounding the … Continue reading
How old is could of, should of, would of, the controversial issue reported on elsewhere in this blog? On reading the proofs for my chapter in the second edition of The Oxford History of English, edited by Lynda Mugglestone and … Continue reading
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High time for a new usage poll: items 31 – 35 from Mittins et al. (1970). Let us have your votes please! And should this poll really get you into the mood for more, there are six more polls to … Continue reading
Elsewhere in this blog I reported on the first quotation from the OED for the term “flat adverb”: 1871 J. Earle Philol. Eng. Tongue vii. 361 The Flat Adverb is simply a substantive or an adjective placed in an adverbial position. (This … Continue reading
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For a paper I’m writing in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project I’m doing a survey into attitudes to particular usage problems. For this pilot study, I’m collecting texts in which people express their opinions to such usage … Continue reading
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Reading Hoffman’s Honger (1990) by Leon de Winter, a Dutch writer (b. 1954) who divides his time between living in The Netherlands and Los Angeles, I was struck by the apostrophe in the title of this novel. Dutch usage of the apostrophe … Continue reading
One of the polls a while ago asked your opinion about this sentence: Traditional and CONTEMPORARY furniture do not go well together. But when we were discussing this sentence during a project meeting the other day, we couldn’t really work … Continue reading
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Peter Tiersma, in a chapter called “The Legal Lexicon”, notes: In American English, shall has become virtually obsolete, so that the sole future modal verb is will (Tiersma 1999:105). Is this indeed the case? Do copy editors allow “I will” … Continue reading
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The previous post quoted an example from Lindley Murray’s English Grammar to illustrate that restrictive relative clauses are not separated from the antecedent by a comma: A man who is of a detractory spirit, will misconstrue … (1795:164). Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw, a specialist … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 