Awful, embarrassing news about our education system from the American grammar blogger David Crystal. (Spotter’s badge to the estimable John E McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun.) Asked to include an “appropriate” adverb in the phrase “The sun shone ________ in the sky”, children were marked down for using “bright” and “dutifully”. Crystal points out, rightly […]

Does anyone else slightly want to cry at that thing John Humphrys does on the Today programme about once every two years, when new slang words are put in the dictionary? You know, the thing where he pronounces each of the terms that the Youth of Today use, in a voice that suggests he is […]

There’s a lovely piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum, on the strange phrase “‘Twas ever thus”. It survives in the language as an idiom, even though the grammar used in it is completely archaic. You can’t, as Pullum points out, use “ever” in affirmative clauses: we’d normally say “always” […]

  Are we allowed to speak ill of the recently dead? The general convention is No, especially when the dead are honoured artists. Indeed, we are usually expected to eulogise. But sometimes these eulogies go so far, and get so absurd, that the honest response is to say Hang on, that’s rubbish. And so it […]