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The self-righteous slang police are a real pain, innit?
Yesterday Harris Academy in Norwood banned several slang words from its halls, including “coz”, “aint”, “like”, and “you woz”. Twitter didn’t like it one bit. “The Harris Academy in Norwood has started banning words.” wrote one user “F–––– them obviously”. “The f–––wits at Harris Academy that go around banning words have more in common with […]
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Conference: Literacy across the curriculum in different languages and contexts
Madrid, 17-19 October 2013 Access to the conference webpage
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More Ugly Disagreements
It’s been barely a month since my last litany of subject-verb agreement errors, but the file is overflowing once again. The topic is tedious, the errors exasperating. Readers notice and find it hard to understand why we make so many rather rudimentary mistakes. A good question. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/more-ugly-disagreements/
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Why so little Chinese in English?
How to kowtow ON TWITTER, a friend asked “Twenty years from now, how many Chinese words will be common parlance in English?” I replied that we’ve already had 35 years since Deng Xiaoping began opening China’s economy, resulting in its stratospheric rise—but almost no recent Chinese borrowings in English. Many purported experts are willing to […]
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Johnson becomes a column once again
IT HAS been just a bit over three years since our 1990s-era Johnson column in the newspaper was revived as this blog. Johnson’s format is now about to change again—to become, once more, a column. This time it will be hosted online, on our sister blog Prospero, which covers cultural matters. If you haven’t already added […]
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Mottakelse to New York
WHEN using any kind of translation helper—dictionary, Babel Fish or Google Translate—remember that if you don’t know the target language, you should always have a native speaker take a look at the final product. Otherwise, your results might be as flamboyantly incompetent as those in this shop window, which I passed not long ago in […]