Tag Archives: usage guides

Grammar Rock

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Cynthia Lange

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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Usage guides for our collection

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Ingrid Tieken

Kate Wild, one of our contributors, has kindly lent us two copies of her usage guides: anon., A Dictionary of Daily Blunders. London: Whittaker & Co (1880) anon. Many Mistakes Mended. New York: N. Tibbals & Sons (1886). The first of this … Continue reading →

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Your favourite usage guide?

Posted on October 18, 2011 by BtU Admin

“How can our listeners help you?” was a question Tom Holland asked  when he interviewed Ingrid Tieken on the BBC Radio 4 programme Making History (broadcast: Tuesday 18 October 2011). Listeners of Making History can help us by telling us … Continue reading →

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Prescriptivism in different linguistic fields

Posted on October 4, 2011 by BtU Admin

Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves (2003) deals with punctuation, while Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926 and later editions) deals with grammar and lexis. Do we find usage guides in fairly equal numbers for all linguistic fields, spelling, punctuation, grammar, … Continue reading →

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Loss of the passive

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Ingrid Tieken

Today, Geoffrey Leech (University of Lancaster) gave a plenary lecture at the Helsinki Corpus Festival, called “Decline and (?)disappearance: The negative side of recent changes in Standard English”. One of his examples of recent change was the loss of the … Continue reading →

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Refusing to condemn “ain’t”

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Ingrid Tieken

This week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review includes an essay by Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist from the University of California (Berkeley), called “When a dictionary could outrage“. Nunberg compares the recent decision of the Oxford English Dictionary to adopt … Continue reading →

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Usage Guide Drive

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Robin Straaijer

Help us bridge the unbridgeable! For the project Bridging the Unbridgeable we are compiling a database of English usage guides and this is why we’re inviting you to contribute. Not nearly as many usage guides are available in electronic form … Continue reading →

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Special issue of English Today

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Ingrid Tieken

Last year, a special issue appeared of English Today, entirly focussed on usage guides. Topics included how Fowler became “The Fowler”, taboo and purism, the birth of the usage guide, the issue of prescriptivism in a major dictionary like the … Continue reading →

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