As the grammar wars rumble on, can the prescriptivists and the descriptivists ever be friends? It seems unlikely The great grammarian Otto Jesperson, writing in 1909, said English grammar was “not a set of stiff dogmatic precepts, according to which some things are correct and others absolutely wrong”; but was living and developing, “founded on […]

The Guardian’s proposed new guidelines when writing about transgender people There are two core concepts that help in understanding transgender people and their experiences. First, gender and sex are distinct in this context: sex = biology, ie sex assigned at birth; gender = one’s innate sense of self. Thus, transgender (where the Latin trans means […]

If you want a single word that describes wandering around the house wearing a shirt and no trousers, ask a Hungarian Endlessly encyclopaedic as it seems, there are times our beloved English language fails us. Ironically, there are various terms for wordiness: loquacious, garrulous, verbose, voluble, prolix. But when we want our language to be […]

A shocking story of verbal abuse suggests we should be more sensitive about using the word ‘ginger’ A couple of months ago, police were called in when red-haired pupils at an academy in Yorkshire were the victims of “kick a ginger kid day”. An isolated incident? Perhaps not. “This letter is to respectfully ask that […]

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, […]

The word ‘amid’ is scarcely used at all in spoken or written English. Why, then, is it so popular with journalists? “Hi, Brian! Where’s Sophie?” “Sophie and I have split up amid rumours of an affair.” “Why are you talking like that?” “This conversation comes amid revelations that I’ve landed a job as a subeditor.” […]