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Bugger! Microsoft has deleted the dirty words
There’s precious little fun to be had with the thesaurus built into my computer Wrong type of language: computer dictionaries censor the politically incorrect. Photograph: Getty In the words of John Cleese, I would like to register a complaint. via Books blog + Written language | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1o0NjDq
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When Spell-Check Can’t Help
More sound-alike mix-ups — both rare and common. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1eJjl0y
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Tweeting in style
“TWEETING” is a word we try to avoid in The Economist. But this hasn’t prevented us from sending out our style guide on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. To mark the 1,000th style tweet and the first anniversary of this feed, we have gone through all the messages to identify the most popular (as measured by […]
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Why grammar isn’t cool – and why that may be about to change | Mind your language
Despite its reputation, grammar is colourful and fascinating. Now experts report a renewed interest in the subject A 15-year-old boy made headlines last week after writing a passionate letter of complaint to Tesco regarding bad grammar on its bottles of orange juice. Tesco claimed it used the “most tastiest” oranges, rather than “tastiest”, “most tasty” […]
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Close but Not Quite
In careful writing, it’s not enough to know the general meaning of a word. Precise usage requires knowing exactly how a word should fit into a sentence. If we slip, the meaning may still be clear enough. But errors are distracting and can make our prose seem slipshod — like a faulty translation from another […]
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Of Pulp fiction and James Bond
OLGA SOBOLEV is an academic at the London School of Economics who specialises in various aspects of Russian culture, including comparative studies of anglophone and Soviet literature during the cold war. She is the author of “The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw and Russia” (2012). Were there similarities between the literature on […]