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Man Bites Sandwich
Our reporters interview people all the time — sometimes over lunch, dinner or coffee. Often, though, the reference to what someone is consuming seems rote or pointless. This write-by-numbers effect is even worse if we use cliched descriptions like “nibbled,” “munched” or “picked at.” After Deadline http://ift.tt/1j7OZFD
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UK universities – it’s time to go to India
In five year’s time, India will have the largest number of students enrolled in higher education. The UK can’t sit back, it must go to India, urges report UK universities must go to India if they are to benefit from a shake up to international higher education which will see India enrolling the largest number […]
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The pedants’ revolt: lament for a golden age of grammar that never existed | Mind your language
As the grammar wars rumble on, can the prescriptivists and the descriptivists ever be friends? It seems unlikely The great grammarian Otto Jesperson, writing in 1909, said English grammar was “not a set of stiff dogmatic precepts, according to which some things are correct and others absolutely wrong”; but was living and developing, “founded on […]
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Such and Such
When “as such” is used correctly, with a clear antecedent, you should be able to substitute that antecedent for “such” and have the sentence make sense. But we frequently misuse “as such” in a much looser way to connect two thoughts. If there’s no clear noun antecedent for “such,” think again and rephrase. After Deadline […]
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Johnson: Strategically speaking
JOHNSON often takes a curious rather than a judgmental view of language use: where many fuss and fret that the language is falling to pieces, your columnist often finds that examining the messy use of language in the real world is more fun than finger-wagging. But that doesn’t mean that Johnson doesn’t think that words […]
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Understanding gender diversity: sex and gender are not the same thing | Mind your language
The Guardian’s proposed new guidelines when writing about transgender people There are two core concepts that help in understanding transgender people and their experiences. First, gender and sex are distinct in this context: sex = biology, ie sex assigned at birth; gender = one’s innate sense of self. Thus, transgender (where the Latin trans means […]