Do people need to change their local accents to get on in life? The answer is “yes” according to those advocating a prescriptivist approach to language use who often emphasize that in professional settings and in job interviews local accents … Continue reading
In The English Journal of November 1927, George Norvell reported that the teachers of Beaumont Senior High School were so tired of their students’ nonchalant disregard for rules of correct English which they had learned “dozens and perhaps hundreds of … Continue reading
Last week, I was fervently combing the earliest volumes of The English Journal, hoping to track down some articles about usage guides and problems for the database. After a while, just when I had figured that Volume 10, Issue 8 … Continue reading
Earlier this month, March fourth to be precise, National Grammar Day was celebrated in the U.S. I like to think was the impetus for many dinners of punctuation-meatloaf (or walnut loaf for the veggie punctuation partiers among us). The day … Continue reading
In a single day of reading, copying, pasting, and generally mulling over usage guide entries, grammar songs – such as Conjunction Junction and that one about pronouns – occur to me more often than I care to admit. Although these … Continue reading
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Being asked to review the Collins online dictionary reminded me of my vocabulary classes as a first-year student at the department of English language & literature at the University of Amsterdam nearly 20 years ago. We had to study concordance … Continue reading
I just found out this week that linguists at University College London have developed an app called interactive Grammar of English (iGE). The app is based on the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) developed by the … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 