Infographic: Weird Plurals
The English language grows by pursuing other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. It is ridiculously complex and contradictory, and nowhere [Read More ...]
Language
The Ten Lost Letters of the English Alphabet (video)
Here's a fun and useful video for anyone trying to read historical documents or trying to write historical fiction. As everyone who has heard the song can attest, English has 26 letters. But what few [Read More ...]
How to Say a Lot and Mean Nothing (videos)
Lorem Ipsum is the name for a class of text generators that can create vast quantities of almost intelligible content. There is apparently an audio equivalent. (It doesn't have a specific name, [Read More ...]
With the Help of Ivanka Trump, Dictionary.com Chooses “Complicit” as its Word of the Year
In a nod to current events, Dictionary.com has chosen the word "complicit" as its word of the year: Defined as “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act, especially with others,” [Read More ...]
About That “Dramatic Growth of Swearing in Books”
A recently published academic paper has shown that the weakening of censorship inside publishers has lead to a dramatic increase in the use of swear words in American books since 1950. The paper [Read More ...]
Did Sherlock Holmes Give us the Cliche ‘the Smoking Gun’?
Arthur Conan Doyle is credited by many for sparking the invention of forensic science through his character, Sherlock Holmes. Now the famed author has been falsely credited with giving us the phrase, [Read More ...]
On Standard eBooks’ “Light Modernization”
When Standard eBooks first gained widespread attention last week, a number of people complained about that project's stated intention to alter the ebooks it created by changing the punctuation and [Read More ...]
43 Words Invented by Authors (video)
Words! As if we weren't already cursed with an excess, writers have a tendency to invent new words dixon-boxen (see?). If you are an entymology nut like myself and can't get enough of words and [Read More ...]
Guest Post: In Defense of Grammar Pedantry
This week, the financial press reported the downfall of a high-profile grammar pedant, Professor Paul Romer, the World Bank’s chief economist, who was hoist(ed) on his own pedantic petard. He is [Read More ...]
“Non-Racist” Grammar & Langauge
Last week the University of Washington, Tacoma, caught some flack from the media for its supposed plan to "dismantle the rules of grammar" because "the conventional rules on how to structure [Read More ...]
Words That Aren’t As Related As They Appear (video)
I have posted a number of videos which look at the oddities of the English language, and like most writers, I have a deep fascination with etymology and language. This next video, for example, shows [Read More ...]
Dictionary.com Chose “Xenophobia” as the 2016 Word of the Year
Thanks to the influence of Donald Trump's campaign for President, Dictionary.com has picked xenophobia as its word of the year for 2016. First used in English in the late 1800s, xenophobia finds [Read More ...]
Harry Potter and the Translator’s Nightmare (video)
As anyone who has read the books can tell you, the Harry Potter series is written in British English, and is replete with cultural references which are difficult to translate across borders, much [Read More ...]
Oxford Dictionaries Shuts Down “Most Hated Word” Project After it’s Hijacked by Trolls
Oxford Dictionaries has just learned the hard way why one does not run open-ended unsupervised polls on the internet. At the beginning of this month the OD launched a new project which invited [Read More ...]
Amazon Won’t Carry Kannada-Langauge eBook, Indian Literary Community Freaks Out
Remember back in 2011 when Amazon removed a Maltese-language book from the Kindle, and everyone lost their shit? It's happening again, this time in India. The Times of India, Bangalore Mirror, and [Read More ...]