When in doubt about questions of usage, I do as I suppose most other people do as well: I google it. That is only, however, the starting point of most internet searches. What I wanted to find out when I … Continue reading
In the past two years, we’ve been publishing a series of interactive features in the journal English Today as a way to engage more readers in issues of interest to our research project. (Past features can also be found on … Continue reading
… to help us get enough data by filling in the survey on flat adverbs (as in go slow rather than slowly). Our target is to have over 100 respondents, and we are not nearly half way there. So please fill in … Continue reading
The sixth installment in the Bridging the Unbridgeable series of interactive features was published in the June 2015 issue of the English Today journal. In this feature, we ask readers to contribute to investigating the issue of the non-literal, intensifier use of … Continue reading
The March issue of English Today includes the latest feature article from our project in which I discuss the options English has to refer to more than one ‘octopus’ as well as a usage rhyme written on this specific topic. Four … Continue reading
It’s new year’s eve, and time to look back on the year that is almost behind us! Several remarkable events happened this year, events that we all reported on in this blog. First there was the new edition of Sir … Continue reading
The December issue of English Today contains the latest feature article from our project in which I am discussing the acceptability of the dangling participle. Here are some of the main points addressed in the article The dangling participle – a language myth?: … Continue reading
In the latest issue of English Today I briefly address the history of the possessive apostrophe, the most notorious punctuation mark in the English language. Here are some interesting facts from the article: Did you know that the apostrophe was first … Continue reading
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This is the title of an article by John Honey, published in 1995 in English Today. In the article Honey makes a plea for “agree[ing] upon [a] reasonable form of prescriptivism”, discussing as a case study the occurrence of pronoun … Continue reading
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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 