-
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
-
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,…
-
Billions and Billions
-
Johnson: Lexical clean-ups
LAST week Johnson picked his Word of the Year for 2013. And now that the holiday guests are gone and the house is finally clean again, it’s time to look at the mess left behind, and do a little sorting of the lexicon. People rather like end-of-the-year “Worst Words” columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in…
-
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
-
Language police, smart babies and linguistics online – languages news round up
A round up of languages in the news finds that babies can detect different languages, a boom of online language learning and the French aren’t happy about a particular English abbreviation More than 100 million people are going online to learn a language Writing in Wired, the co-founder of Babbel, a language learning tool, explains…