English is a language that doesn't just borrow words, it follows other languages down dark alleys, clubs them over the head, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary (or...
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Category: Language
When Dictionaries Ruled the World
It's 2018 and we live in an era where the Oxford English Dictionary adds words to its lexicon willy-nilly. If a word is used somewhere in the word by...
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Infographic: How to Correctly List Adjectives in English
Here's a tip about the English language that native speakers learn instinctively and ESL learners have to learn the hard way. Did you know there's a reason that early...
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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 is this...
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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Here's a fun and useful video for anyone trying to read historical documents or trying to write historical fiction.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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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“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...
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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...
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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...
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