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Bright Passages
In a brief respite from danglers and who/whom problems, here’s another small sampling of sparkling prose from the last few weeks. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1i9Km0N
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Time to change the language we use about mental health | Mind your language
The world has moved on since the days of ‘Bonkers Bruno’ headlines, but we still need to mind our language It’s political correctness gone mentally unstable. That’s right, you can’t say anything these days – and here’s yet another article telling us what language we can and can’t use. Cue eye-rolls and tuts. Actually, I […]
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Johnson: By their fruits ye shall know them
TWO years ago, a short post on the Johnson blog, called “What is the Chinese language?”, became one of the most commented pieces in the history of Economist.com. Classifying languages is a hot topic, because linguistic and social facts can be hard to disentangle. Last week, we returned to the topic with a piece called […]
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Tricky Little Things
Hyphens cause us no end of confusion, perhaps because the only overarching rule is this: Use them when they are needed and don’t when they aren’t. Of course, that distinction may not always be clear. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1k6WPm7
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Margaret Atwood translates translation
The novelist has great sympathy for those taking her work abroad, perhaps because her own life has provided similar problems to decode As it was the WG Sebald lecture, Margaret Atwood told her audience at the British Library, she was entitled to make it as freeform as Sebald’s writing, full of “peripatetic” wanderings, mixing up memoir with […]
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Doge: such grammar. Very rules. Most linguistics. Wow
You know an internet meme has pretty much breathed its last when the Today programme brings in someone to talk about it and explain why it’s funny, while the presenter patronises them and pronounces the word “online” as though they’re picking it up with tweezers. Today, that happened to Doge. (In fairness Evan Davis, for […]