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When insults become the norm, dialogue is debased | Mind your language
If you call someone a Nazi just because you disagree with them, you have already lost the argument Fraped. For the unacquainted, it’s a perturbing portmanteau of "Facebook" and "raped" something that happens when you forget to log out and forget to cut out that annoying practical joker friend from your life. Rape is an […]
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Johnson: Mountains high enough and rivers wide enough
WHY do some places in the world have lots of small languages, and others have fewer, bigger languages? Earlier studies seemed to show that areas of high altitude, rainfall and temperature had high cultural and linguistic diversity. A brief glance in the direction of the geography and linguistic diversity of the Caucasus, central Africa or […]
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If you’re so upset about ‘literally’, why aren’t you fussing about ‘really’?
These people who use “really” to describe things that aren’t actually real! They’re the worst, aren’t they? As we all know, “really” is the adverbial form of the adjective “real”, and “real” means “actually existing, true”. “He really blew my socks off”: did he? Did he really? No he didn’t! He metaphorically or figuratively blew […]
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Close but Not Quite
It’s not enough to pick a word in the general vicinity of what we mean, or something that sounds about right. We should be choosing words precisely and using them with care in sentences. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1rdRKZW
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75 years after ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ we need Ma Joad in the White House
After its publication 75 years ago this month, “The Grapes of Wrath” became instantly renowned for its depiction of Depression-era poverty and homelessness; for the debate over whether John Steinbeck wrote truthfully about California’s miserable migrant camps (Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in to defend his accuracy); for its salty language (the book was banned in Bakersfield, […]
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New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1jQWJMZ