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Come hell or high water, Dick Swiveller, as it were
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” […]
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Struggles With ‘Than’
For some reason, comparative constructions with “than” or “as” give us no end of trouble. Probably the most common lapse is using “than” when “as” is called for — for example, “She raised more than three times as much money in the campaign than Mr. Smith.” But there are more arcane stumbles, as well. Look […]
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Seamus Heaney, the Nelson Mandela of Irish poetry, just wasn’t that good. Sorry
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 […]
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The weekly Linguistics and Society bulletin is out
Click this link to read the new issue: http://paper.li/jromerotrillo/1377864060 You can register to receive the bulletin every Friday
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Jafaican it? No we’re not | Mind your language
Comedians might play the patois of multicultural Britain for laughs, but spoken English has been drawing on influences from other languages and dialects for centuries British comedy has always liked a foreign voice to poke fun at, particularly one that hails from one of the former colonies; from Peter Sellers’ “Indian” accent to the characters […]
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Why nobody wants a ‘worthy’ book
It might be a good thing in other contexts, but a ‘worthy’ reputation will get you nowhere as a writer When did “worthy” become a pejorative term? Orange prize judge Kirsty Lang was praising Rose Tremain’s winning novel, The Road Home, when she said that “though it could have been a worthy book, it wasn’t”. […]