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Seeing red | Mind your language
A shocking story of verbal abuse suggests we should be more sensitive about using the word ‘ginger’ A couple of months ago, police were called in when red-haired pupils at an academy in Yorkshire were the victims of “kick a ginger kid day”. An isolated incident? Perhaps not. “This letter is to respectfully ask that […]
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Slave trade documents among illegal Foreign Office cache
Papers might provide information for people seeking compensation for ancestors’ suffering, says historian Historic papers about the slave trade are among the enormous cache of public documents that the Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded in a secret archive, the Guardian has learned. Some of the papers appear to date back to 1662 and are thought […]
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Dear Flacks… Love Hack
ONE of the most enjoyable pieces Johnson ever wrote was one on the etiquette of bribery. Even in the most corrupt places on earth, where bribery is constant, it is dressed up. Rarely is money passed from hand to hand and in plain sight. Rather, dropped envelopes and left suitcases are preferred, even if nobody […]
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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/1kGTQSg
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A factoid is not a small fact. Fact | Mind your language
A factoid is subtly different from a trivial fact, whatever Steve Wright may claim A Guardian book review described how Lurpak butter was named after the lur, a curved brass horn popular in the first and second millennia BC in and around Denmark, referring to this as a “fascinating factoid”. It may have been fascinating, […]
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Billions and Billions
Not just wrong, but a thousand times wrong. That’s what happens when we confuse a million with a billion, or (more rarely) a billion with a trillion. We should take a deep breath, stop, think, check and then double-check every reference to such large numbers. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1iNqNYT