What words “should” mean and what they actually mean
Steve Finan of the Sunday Post has had a rant about “decimate”. He insists on the “reduce by 10%” meaning. It’s a word I struggle to care about, so rather than get into the details I’ll point you...
View ArticleHow “humbled” took pride
Something odd is going on with the verb “humble”. If you check a dictionary, you’ll find that it means something like “cause to feel unworthy or insignificant”, but people often use it to mean...
View ArticleUse split infinitives to better support your meaning
As the Labour party continues to decay under the shambling non-leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, its MPs find themselves freer to pursue their own interests. One of them, Gerald Kaufman, has decided to...
View Article‘Got’ and ‘gotten’ in British and American English
As every loyal British subject knows, American English is bad and wrong and stupid and a threat to our way of life. So I guess that makes me a traitor. I find it hard to worry about a few new imported...
View ArticleWord By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries – by Kory Stamper
It turns out that dictionaries don’t just coalesce out of the antique dust in academic libraries, hardening on the shelves into compendia of immutable, authoritative Truth. Human beings write them....
View ArticlePaul Romer and the World Bank and conjunctions and brevity and bad targets
The World Bank’s chief economist, Paul Romer, has been demanding that his staff use the word “and” less. Why? It’s such an innocuous little word. This is his thinking: Circulating a draft of the...
View ArticleIf the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
The only thing as bizarre and horrifying as the Trump administration’s loudening belches of vicious, incompetent corruption is the coverage thereof in the New Yorker. Specifically, the punctuation. You...
View ArticleAlighting the escalator: a transitive in transit
The other day I saw this sign at a railway station: Sorry the photo’s a bit blurry, but funnily enough I was on a moving escalator at the time. When I saw it I thought: “‘Alight the escalator’? What in...
View ArticleChildhood glimpses of a truer reality
You know that electric thrill when something jostles a shapeless old sack full of dim notions in one of the dusty, dark rooms at the back of your head and it rolls overs and its contents somehow...
View ArticleHow do you cope when everyone’s usage is wrong?
The remarkable thing about language change is that it only started happening when I started noticing it. For centuries, English was constant and true, but as soon as I was old enough to have an...
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Fronted adverbials: what the hell is going on with English grammar?
Every so often a kerfuffle erupts about the teaching of grammar in English schools, and the focal point these days is often the ugly term “fronted adverbials”. What on earth are these obscure things,...
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Why can’t the English learn to speak about English?
Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady Clare Foges has written a passionate column in the Times about the dangers posed by linguistic prejudice. She highlights evidence of discrimination...
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Bad grammar, bugbears and dæmons
Dafne Keen as Lyra with Pantalaimon, from the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Susan McDonald, an experienced subeditor at the Guardian, has written an article that appears to be...
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Writing skills and grammar teaching: the misinterpreted study of Englicious
A teacher running an interactive grammar exercise (still from Englicious in the Classroom video) A recent study, as you may or may not have heard, has found that teaching grammar to Year 2 children...
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When words don’t mean what they’re meant to mean
Plato, the inventor of the plate. David Bentley Hart has written a witty, insightful, elegant and provocative piece on ‘How to write English prose’. Given the topic, it’s hard to judge the style and...
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Boffin-biffing buffoons baffled by beef, before befriending
The Institute of Physics has launched a campaign against using the word “boffin” to refer to scientists and other researchers. They argue that the word conjures up an unhelpful, outdated stereotype...
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Colonial English?
‘A new and accurat map of the world’ by John Speed, 1626. We regret to inform you it is neither new nor accurat. Oxfam drew some political flak earlier in the year when it published a new version of...
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Leaving everything or leaving nothing? A saying of two halves
Alex Greenwood, who hurt her head pondering a point of semantics. The greatest controversy arising from England’s footballing defeat to Spain yesterday wasn’t about aggressive tackles, debatable...
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Congratulations and confabulations
I asked HAL 9000 to write this blog post for me. Damn thing couldn’t even get my name right. I get irrationally annoyed by dictionary ‘word of the year’ announcements. Something that is obviously of...
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