One of my colleagues asked me the following question:
Do you happen to know when the ‘rule’ of not beginning a sentence with a conjunction was formulated?
This is just the sort of question that we would be able to answer once our database of usage guides and usage problems is up and running, but it isn’t as yet, so does anyone else know? Why was it formulated to begin with? And do you object to starting a sentence with and or but, or any other conjunctions? If so why?
Yesterday was National Grammar Day in the United States – a day to celebrate language and the neat things we do with it. National Grammar Day was established in 2008 by Martha Brockenbrough founder of SPOGG (Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar). This year’s sponsor is Mignon Fogarty, host of the handy site Grammar Girl which has been mentioned elsewhere on this blog.
Technically, the imperative to ‘march forth’ to promote good speaking and writing expired yesterday, but the celebration continues on the National Grammar Day website. The site features fun language-related items that can be enjoyed year-round. I recommend the dangerously catchy theme song, ‘March Forth: The Grammar Song‘.
I am one of many fans of the public radio program, A Way with Words. The show is broadcast from San Diego and presented by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. They discuss a variety of language-related topics in an accessible, upbeat, and informative manner. Part of what I find so entertaining about the program is how the hosts navigate the tricky territory between staying true to their descriptive approach and sating some listeners’ desire for unequivocal answers to usage questions. A great example of this can be found around minute 20 of the recent episode, Secret Gibberish. The caller voices her irritation with the descriptive approach and longs for an Academy of English.
As a non-native learner of English I was taught in school that try and was a typical English idiom, and I’ve always happily used it. I was therefore surprised to learn that try and was reported as being one of the pet linguistic hates with BBC news writers.
My awareness of this usage problem was recently heightened by the fact that a reader of a draft version of a book I’m writing commented on my regular use of try and which he or she said was “too informal for scholarly writing”. I’ll follow the reader’s suggestion, and change all my try ands to try tos (even though I don’t like “to try to …”: too many tos!).
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Elsewhere in this blog we reported on the controversial use of hun hebben in Dutch today: it is widely used, possibly even spreading rapidly, but highly stigmatised at the same time. The pronoun hun in standard Dutch is an oblique form (“them”) or … Continue reading
One of the readers of this blog drew our attention to the fact that there is a list of disputed usages in Wikipedia. The list includes ain’t, less for fewer, like for as, which were all dealt with elsewhere in this blog. And some occur in the usage polls as well.
Would you ever consult a list like that, or recommend it to students or clients you work for as copy-editors perhaps? Or would you like to add any other features to it?
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During the past few days we have acquired two sets of autograph letters by John Honey. One set, as the image below illustrates, contains a large number of letters connected with the reception of his controversial pamphlet The Language Trap … Continue reading
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The quotation in this title is from an article by David Crystal on the split infinitive which appeared in English Today in 1985. It was taken from a book by Robert Burchfield, The English Language, which had come out that … Continue reading
One of the corrections in the second edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, originally published in 1814 but reissued in 1816, includes you was. This change was recorded by Kathryn Sutherland in her comparison of the two editions of the novel (Penguin … Continue reading
The three PhD positions for the Bridging the Unbridgeable project that were announced earlier in this blog have now been advertised officially. You will find them on the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics website. For more information about the positions as well as for a description of the project details, please contact Ingrid Tieken, through the email address provided in the LUCL advertisement.
It might be relevant to know that we are looking for candidates with an MA in linguistics, preferably in English language and/or linguistics. Please note that the deadline for applications is 15 March 2012.
