Tag Archives: Lynne Truss

More than th-fronting

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Ingrid Tieken

I keep on looking for instances of prescriptivism or metalinguistic comments on prescriptive issues in English literature. My call for examples in English Today recently did not produce any more examples unfortunately. The solution? Keep on reading, and even rereading. … Continue reading →

Posted in usage guide | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Of compound words and the doom of English

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Carmen Ebner

Have you ever noticed a difference between American and British English when it comes to compound words? Lynne Truss, author of the bestseller Eats, Shoots and Leaves, argues in her weekly column in The Telegraph that the American tradition of compounding … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Punctuation matters

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Anoeska Bronswijk

Nowadays, people seem to be more tolerant towards language. Punctuation errors, for instance, seem to be accepted more often, as understandability is believed to be more important than correctness. Lynne Truss, the well-known author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged , | Leave a comment

HUGE database

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Robin Straaijer

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 →

Posted in news, technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Donna and the Oxford Comma

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Ingrid Tieken

During a British Academy lecture in 2011, David Crystal mentioned that language was rarely the object of a work of art. Well, here is a work of art created by Donna Piët for an exhibition called “Een Poging tot Nieuwe … Continue reading →

Posted in news, usage features | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Prescriptivism in literary fiction

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Ingrid Tieken

Is prescriptivism a topic among the general public, one of the target groups of our research? I would say: yes. For reading David Lodge‘s Deaf Sentence (Penguin 2008), I came across this:  … he [son-in-law] thinks you must be silently criticising his English all … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

What are “usage guides” called in other languages?

Posted on October 21, 2011 by BtU Admin

The usage guide seems a typical English – British as well as American – phenomenon, though one of our commenters, Nadia Petrova, has already drawn our attention to the fact that they are also popular in Russia today. But what … Continue reading →

More Galleries | Tagged , | 1 Comment