Category Archives: usage features

Hisself: should we allow it or not?

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

And here is another blogpost from one of my MA students. Maha Khalil would like to know why the non-standard reflexive pronoun hisself remains non-standard today. The blogpost was inspired …  … by an article published by the Scottish writer … Continue reading →

Posted in polls and surveys, usage features | Tagged , | 3 Comments

I come, I seen, I chased him up the street

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

And here is Amos van Baalen’s first blogpost. And if you are a native speaker of Australian or British English, do take the time to contribute to his research by filling in the survey below. It won’t take a lot … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features, usage guide | Tagged | 1 Comment

Singular they and women

Posted on March 26, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

Back and forth to Berlin last week, for the Wild Publics conference organised by Theresa Heyd and Britta Schneider. There were two papers on prescriptivism, my own (Codification – prescription – prescriptivism: The authority of the lay-person) and one by … Continue reading →

Posted in news, usage features | Tagged | 1 Comment

You say Ke-no-ah and I say Keen-wah

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

And here is Lizi Richards’s first blogpost (again, it isn’t as far as I know an issue in The Netherlands!):  Even in 2018, a strong argument can be made that the British general public are obsessed with accents. Lesley Milroy, … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged , | 5 Comments

On the front page no less

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

Most of the usage problems studied by Mittins et al. in the late 1960s (Attitudes to English Usage, 1970) have since increased in acceptability. This is what we tested by repeating their survey in the form of usage polls on this … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized, usage features | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

His, his or her, their

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

If people think singular they is a new feature in the English language, arising out of the need to express gender neutrality: it isn’t. There was already an article about the pronoun in 1975, by Ann Bodine. Very well worth … Continue reading →

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A which hunter at it again

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Ingrid Tieken

I just proofread an article of mine which had been copy-edited, in the process of which all my whichs (and some whos) had been changed into thats! Copy-editors tend to be anonymous, but I bet this person was American. Another … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged | 7 Comments

We understood that to “decimate” meant to kill one in 10

Posted on July 29, 2017 by adrianstenton

This is a quotation from a new book, The Beast, by Alexander Starritt, due out on 7 September, and previewed in today’s Guardian by Ian Jack, about a fictionalised sub-editor on the Daily Mail. It might make entertaining reading!

Posted in news, usage features | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Another Americanism?

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Ingrid Tieken

In her book Horrible Words: A Guide to the Misuse of English (2016), Rebecca Gowers uses the word gripers in preference to sticklers (a word I myself always associate with Lynne Truss’s  famous Eats Shoots and Leaves), and in her paper at our Life after HUGE? symposium … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

A missing word?

Posted on June 30, 2017 by adrianstenton

I was copy-editing a paper for a language journal today, and came across this: “… children may or may not identify phonemes better audiovisually than auditory only.” The prescriptivist in me baulked at the combination of adverb and adjective, and … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged | 8 Comments