Category Archives: usage guide

Parasitic plants and buttons: on language imagery

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Marten van der Meulen‘s second blog post is about imagery and usage. Writing a usage guide is hard work, not in the least because the subject matter can be dry like a desert. Who but the most hardened language pundits will … Continue reading →

Posted in MA Leiden, usage guide | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Which dialect?

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

I’ve just finished another of Kingsley Amis’s novels, a children’s book called We are all guilty (1991). Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) also wrote a usage guide, The King’s English, which was published two years after his death. Amis’s fascination with language is evident … Continue reading →

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Are Americanisms taking over the British Language?

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Below follows Jan van den Berg’s first blogpost: “American influence is busily eroding a valuable and once firm distinction in British speech and writing” (Amis 1997: 11). This is a quotation from Kingsley Amis’s usage guide The King’s English (1997). As we … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features, usage guide | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

What makes a usage guide? 

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Robin Straaijer

During the construction of the HUGE database, I have been thinking about the genre of usage guides a lot for the simple, practical purpose of determining which titles would be put in the database, and which would not. Edmund Weiner asked … Continue reading →

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Congratulations, Rebecca Gowers …

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

… on the appearance of your revised and updated edition of Plain Words! We are delighted to have been given a copy, and look forward to reading it.

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More usage guides in 2014?

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

The present year promises to be a good year for usage guides. Later this month, Rebecca Gowers’s new edition of her great-grandfather’s Plain Words will be published, an e-version of David Crystal’s Who Cares about English Usage will come out, … Continue reading →

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Who is A. Parody?

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

You don’t have to be very imaginative to see that Eats, Shites & Leaves (2004) parodies the title  of Lynne Truss’s phenomenally popular Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003). And so does the name of the author: A. Parody. The back flap gives … 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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Who was, is Janet Whitcut?

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Ingrid Tieken

(I am grateful to several people, particularly Robert Ilson and Moca Mace, for telling me about their acquaintance with Janet Whitcut.) Janet Whitcut is important for our work as the author, along with Sidney Greenbaum (1929-1996), of The Longman Guide to English … Continue reading →

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Wikis and usage advice

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Morana Lukač

You have surely concluded from our recent polls that we are interested in your favourite online sources on language use. After receiving a large number of different answers from you when asked about your go-to online sources, I noticed that … Continue reading →

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