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Dear Flacks… Love Hack
ONE of the most enjoyable pieces Johnson ever wrote was one on the etiquette of bribery. Even in the most corrupt places on earth, where bribery is constant, it is dressed up. Rarely is money passed from hand to hand and in plain sight. Rather, dropped envelopes and left suitcases are preferred, even if nobody […]
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A factoid is not a small fact. Fact | Mind your language
A factoid is subtly different from a trivial fact, whatever Steve Wright may claim A Guardian book review described how Lurpak butter was named after the lur, a curved brass horn popular in the first and second millennia BC in and around Denmark, referring to this as a “fascinating factoid”. It may have been fascinating, […]
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Billions and Billions
Not just wrong, but a thousand times wrong. That’s what happens when we confuse a million with a billion, or (more rarely) a billion with a trillion. We should take a deep breath, stop, think, check and then double-check every reference to such large numbers. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1iNqNYT
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Johnson: Lexical clean-ups
LAST week Johnson picked his Word of the Year for 2013. And now that the holiday guests are gone and the house is finally clean again, it’s time to look at the mess left behind, and do a little sorting of the lexicon. People rather like end-of-the-year “Worst Words” columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in […]
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Language police, smart babies and linguistics online – languages news round up
A round up of languages in the news finds that babies can detect different languages, a boom of online language learning and the French aren’t happy about a particular English abbreviation More than 100 million people are going online to learn a language Writing in Wired, the co-founder of Babbel, a language learning tool, explains […]
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Stuck in amid hell with you | Mind your language
The word ‘amid’ is scarcely used at all in spoken or written English. Why, then, is it so popular with journalists? “Hi, Brian! Where’s Sophie?” “Sophie and I have split up amid rumours of an affair.” “Why are you talking like that?” “This conversation comes amid revelations that I’ve landed a job as a subeditor.” […]