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Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter)
I’ve just finished the last proofs of the forthcoming volume “Research trends in intercultural pragmatics”, edited by Istvan Kecskes and Jesús Romero-Trillo, to appear in September 2013. See webpage
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If you can’t use an apostrophe, you don’t know your shit | Mind your language
Greengrocers – and big supermarkets – may struggle to tame the ‘apostrofly’, but it’s not actually that hard I used to think “weer” in the song Mama Weer All Crazee Now was Slade’s idiosyncratic spelling of “were”, in Black Country dialect (which I am allowed to make fun of because my family originally came from […]
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Nous twitterons: The French language is getting battered by social media. (The Economist)
Aug 10th 2013 | PARIS | AURELIE FILIPPETTI, the French minister for culture, had to retract a tweet this week after making a glaring spelling mistake. As she is the official guardian of the French language, this was more than a bit embarrassing. Twitter’s spontaneity invites carelessness; and the minister duly blamed a sloppy aide. But for linguistic […]
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Why do we make mistakes? Blame your brain, the original autocorrecter | Mind your language
A normal functioning human sails blithely past errors in a text while understanding perfectly what it means. We see what it’s convenient to see Does Siri make us lazy? Does Facebook make us lonely? Does Twitter make us stupid? Will Google Glass make twitching, distracted Glassholes of us all? If you’ve read a magazine, listened […]
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Born Again in a Second Language (NYT 4/8/2013)
By COSTICA BRADATAN To abandon your native tongue and adopt another is to dismantle yourself,
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Parallel Problems
The Times’s stylebook entry on the either/or construction seems simple. But we stumble often. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/parallel-problems-3/