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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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Elsewhere in this blog we reported on the controversial use of hun hebben in Dutch today: it is widely used, possibly even spreading rapidly, but highly stigmatised at the same time. The pronoun hun in standard Dutch is an oblique form (“them”) or … 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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The quotation in this title is from an article by David Crystal on the split infinitive which appeared in English Today in 1985. It was taken from a book by Robert Burchfield, The English Language, which had come out that … Continue reading
One of the corrections in the second edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, originally published in 1814 but reissued in 1816, includes you was. This change was recorded by Kathryn Sutherland in her comparison of the two editions of the novel (Penguin … 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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“… who moved differently then I knew”: this is a quotation from the website announcing the film Pina by Wim Wenders (UK release 22 April 2011). The error, then for than, is a typical Dutch mistake, according to Joy Burrough-Boenisch in her … 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
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This will be one of the topics discussed at the SENSE panel discussion ‘Varieties of English: How prescriptive should we be?’ on 27 January (see under News for more information). One of the panel members will be Joy Burrough-Boenisch, the author of the … Continue reading
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If today’s pet linguistic hates for BBC journalists and news writers are try and (for try to), concede defeat/victory, gone missing and Americanisms (e.g. turning nouns into verbs and attaching prepositions to verbs: hospitalize, meet with) (see elsewhere in this blog), different ones are listed in Robert Burchfield’s … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 