Lonneke van Leest-Kootkar’s first blogpost is about sticklers and the rest of the prescriptive bunch: Sticklers, pedants, pundits and purists: these are only a couple of terms to describe those prescriptivists who have the tendency to get worked up about … Continue reading
One of the things I’m interested in connection with the research for the Bridging the Unbridgeable project is John Honey, the author of Language is Power (1997) and the earlier pamphlet The Language Trap (1983) (as well as several other publications). Honey’s publications … Continue reading
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Last week I was reminded of the usefulness of Boolean operators by Ewoud Sanders’ booklet on eResearch which is available (in Dutch) here. Because it is often possible to find enough relevant information using simple search queries, I sometimes forget the … Continue reading
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I’m currently reading James Pennebaker’s book The Secret Life of Pronouns (Bloomsbury Press, 2011): fascinating and intriguing, and I find myself nervously watching my own pronoun use as I write (too many first person pronouns already in this first sentence to … Continue reading
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… one of our readers asked a few days ago. “Where was he working when the National Council of Educational Standards asked him to write The Language Trap? Was he an academic?” she asked. What we know about John Honey … Continue reading
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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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This image comes from the website of Plurabelle Books, which is situated in Cambridge (UK). It is part of a bookplate indicating the ownership of the book in which it was found. The owner’s full name is John Raymond de Symons Honey, … Continue reading
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John Honey’s The Language Trap, subtitled “Race, class, and the ‘standard English’ issue in British schools”, is a 38-page pamphlet published in 1983 by the National Council for Educational Standards. It is a controversial document to say the least, even by … Continue reading
This is a suggestion made by John Honey in Language is Power (1997:166-168). Estuary English Honey describes as being typically characterised by t-glottaling and l-vocalisation (though there are many other characteristics of Estuary English as well). Already in 1989 he … 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
Bridging the Unbridgeable 