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Speed-reading? Slow down a little … and leave time for laughter and tears | Mind your language
‘I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.’ As Woody Allen discovered, fast is not necessarily best During the last few weeks, my internet feeds have been inundated with links to Spritz, the new speed-reading application that lets you read a novel in less than 90 minutes. […]
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Johnson: Different tongues, common homes
IT’S not easy being a multilingual country. But that is no excuse for making it harder on yourself. Shortly after taking power following the ousting of Victor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s new government made the unforced error of revoking a 2012 law which granted the Russian language an official status (alongside Ukrianian) in regions where Russian-speakers predominate. […]
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What Britain’s county dialects can tell us about the national character
Take a linguistic tour a holus-bolus fidge-fadge, if you will around some of Britain’s most charming forgotten words When I examined the wonderful collection of glossaries of county dialects I realised just how monastic was the zeal with which the Victorian lexicographers went about their compiling. Just as they collected the rocks, butterflies and ancient […]
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Bright Passages
Before the fault-finding resumes, here’s another small sampling of sparkling prose from recent editions. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1fk9TkK
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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/QnGpK4
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Mind your slanguage, and don’t be an erk. YOLO
Slang should be celebrated, not condemned. It enriches our language from bloomers to booty, from cool to ceebs, and from doing a Lohan to LOLZ The borderline-cult film Mean Girls contains an amusing insight into young people’s eagerness to leave their linguistic trademark on the world. Schoolgirl Gretchen Wieners describes any pleasant situation as "fetch" […]