Today is English Language Day, and yesterday we had a wondeful sneak preview of it with Harry Ritchie’s talk Ashamed of your English?, followed by more talk on English prescriptivism during lunch afterwards. Last year’s post to commemorate the day … Continue reading
Perhaps the most interesting irregular verb form I found in my analyse of the usage guides in HUGE (for a paper I’m giving next week on the topic) is drownded. The only usage guide in the HUGE database that mentions … Continue reading
This is an important question in the context of this project, but it will be one that I have come to decide is impossible to answer. Unfortunately, and (perhaps, for some) frustratingly so. One important tool (or so I thought originally) … Continue reading
Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage contains a lengthy list of works dealing with English usage, studies as well as usage guides. Very useful for our project! There is one item which I can’t quite classify offhand as belonging to either … Continue reading
The creation of a database of English usage guides and usage problems: the Hyper Usage Guide of English, or HUGE-database, is one of the sub-projects within Bridging the Unbridgeable. It is the first database to combine more than two hundred years of usage advice … Continue reading
Sometimes you’ll find interesting explanations about why specific usages are problematic. This one caught my eye recently. It’s from the entry for duct tape in Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Garner quotes a newspaper articles to explain why people … Continue reading
We have added a new page to the blog; it’s called Features. While our blog posts are usually short and to the point, we occasionally want to post longer pieces. These features can take different formats: they can be a … Continue reading
Matthijs Smits sent us a link containing a discussion in the New York Times Online between American usage expert Bryan Garner and Economist journalist Robert Greene. The interview deals with the usual descriptivism/prescriptivism question, and by way of an illustration … Continue reading
Mesthrie et al. write on p. 23 of their book Introducing Sociolinguistics (2nd ed., 2009, Edinburgh University Press, that different verb forms are regarded as standard in the UK than in the US. One example they is give is snuck/sneaked, … Continue reading
This gallery contains 2 photos.
In David Crystal’s Encyclopedia of the English Language (p. 196), Fowler is portrayed in his swimsuit, and so he is in the OxfordWords blog “From telegraphese to texting: one hundred years of the Concise Oxford Dictionary“. I’ve always wondered why: after all, … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 