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Hedging Our Bets
After deadline (NYT)
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The Slang Patrol (NYT 14-10-2014)
Lively, vivid language is always welcome, in features or news stories. But slang, colloquialisms and insider jargon are often jarring and inappropriate in straight-news contexts.
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Scots English: do you know your teuchters from your sassenachs?
Mind your Language (The Guardian), 3-10-2014 Irrespective of the political fallout from the independence referendum, the UK’s language patchwork is stronger having retained the rich tradition of Scots English An illustration from The Poetical Works of Robert Burns (1888), showing Tam o’ Shanter with his ‘drouthy neibors’ – thirsty fellows in the pub. Photograph: /flickr There […]
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War of the words: the global conflict that helped shape our language
(The Guardian 26/9/2014) From genocide and kamikaze to radar and spam, the second world war had a dramatic effect on English
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Let’s eat Grandma! How to use, and not use the comma
‘If you could edit your past, what would you change?’ ‘I’d get rid of all the commas’ – Peter Carey A misplaced comma can provide hours of fun on the web but sabotage the meaning of a sentence.
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Never mind the hyperbolics. Please can I have some less?
When writers overuse hyperbole, it’s not just the readers who suffer – it’s the language