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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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It’s in its right place: how to use apostrophes – the winning haiku. | Mind your language
Some of the best entries from last week’s International Apostrophe Day haiku competition Here are my 10 favourite entries from last week’s competition for International Apostrophe Day. Entrants had to tweet an apostrophe-themed haiku. @Artellus worked out that the tagline #apostropheday had the right number of syllables: Just one haiku each? If so, don’t count […]
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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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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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Obviously … the only way is Essex if you want to hear nouveau cockney. Reem | Mind your language
There’s a good reason why Towie outshines its scripted reality rivals – the language. It’s well educational The reality TV show is an unlikely place to look for linguistic intrigue. Egocentricity requires very little diversity of diction; the only narrative is the first person and the only tone is audaciously brash to conceal the utter […]
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How to become a national treasure | Mind your language
It helps if you’ve been on Strictly Come Dancing, but anyone who has been in the public eye for more than about two minutes is eligible “National treasures are often fools and worse: dare I say that until last year Jimmy Savile was perhaps the greatest of them all?” Tanya Gold wrote in the Guardian […]