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Move over, George Orwell – this is how to sound really clever | Mind your language
A new book lists 600 words to use if you want to impress. But when is it appropriate to deviate from plain English and indulge in sesquipedalian behaviour? Aged 17, I heard a confession that I found exhilarating. Mr Downs, my English teacher, confessed that he’d read the dictionary. Cover to cover. Most sixth-formers at […]
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Close but Not Quite
It’s commendable to add nuance or texture to our prose with a word that’s slightly out of the ordinary. Just be sure the word you pick is the right one, used the right way. It’s not enough to be in the general vicinity. And a misstep is all the more glaring if the word is […]
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Words are stupid, words are fun | Mind your language
As words fall in and out of fashion, new ones enter the language. But some, such as autonaut, chassimover and pupamotor, failed to reach the assembly line English is a marvellous mashup of words. A few Celtic placenames. A stock of Old English words (day and night, black and white, food and drink, life and […]
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It seems dangerously easy to get scientific nonsense published
Academic publishing Science’s Sokal moment The Economist Oct 5th 2013 |From the print edition IN 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a paper to Social Text, a leading scholarly journal of postmodernist cultural studies. The journal’s peer reviewers, whose job it is to ensure that published research is up to snuff, gave it […]
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An epic tale about a small corner shop. New British Fiction
The Economist, Sep 28th 2013 |From the print edition Marriage Material. By Sathnam Sanghera. William Heinemann; 304 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk THE corner shop is not a place of grand narratives. “Reserved for the purchase of emergency milk and Rizlas”, it offers neither the drama of a supermarket nor the space for many characters. Yet it is an institution […]
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New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin via Tumblr http://jesusromerotrillo.tumblr.com/post/63085474334