During the past few days, I received emails (from the UK) that contained the following phrases: An Out-of-Office reply: Please note I work Monday – Wednesday’s only Please supply: Passengers full name (as stated on passport); Passengers date of birth; Passport number … Continue reading
“Flat Adverbs” are defined by the OED as follows: “Not distinguished by a characteristic ending, as an adverb which has the same form as an adjective or substantive, or a substantive used as an adjective” (OED, s.v. flat, adj., adv. … Continue reading
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If today’s pet linguistic hates for BBC journalists and news writers are try and (for try to), concede defeat/victory, gone missing and Americanisms (e.g. turning nouns into verbs and attaching prepositions to verbs: hospitalize, meet with) (see elsewhere in this blog), different ones are listed in Robert Burchfield’s … Continue reading
When setting out to fill in our fourth language poll, one of the readers of this blog found she wanted to leave all the boxes blank for the ‘less’ and ‘try and’ questions, but that the poll wouldn’t allow that. … Continue reading
Let us know what you think about these constructions by filling in our fourth usage poll. You’ll find the poll under the button Usage polls, immediately below the banner of this blog.
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This is the title of an article by John Honey, published in 1995 in English Today. In the article Honey makes a plea for “agree[ing] upon [a] reasonable form of prescriptivism”, discussing as a case study the occurrence of pronoun … Continue reading
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In a very interesting paper called “BBC Style: A look at the style guides and language of BBC Radio News bulletins”, Anya Luscombe, from Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg (The Netherlands), analyses the views on a number of top “pet hates” among … Continue reading
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On the subject of what is called singular they (Everyone has their off-days) Mittins et al. write that Jane Austen “uniformly employs this usage”. The authors refer to S.A. Leonard’s Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage (1929) here, where we … Continue reading
Mind Your Language is a fantastic blog run by The Guardian on usage problems, the use of style guides and many related matters. Particularly the entries by David Marsh are well worth reading. Among the usage items dealt with we find: … Continue reading
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We would very much like to know whether readers consider the sentence in the title to this post problematic or not. It is of course – as aficionados will immediately recognise – from the Startrek trailer, and the construction in question is … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 