The car (auto?) industry’s Poet Laureate. Or, what’s in a name.

My last post was about Britain’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Today’s is about American poet Marianne Moore and her relationship with the US car industry. Marianne was a winner of the Helen Haire Levinson Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. In 1995, she was approached by David Wallace and Bob Young from Ford’s …

POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS

My first post on this blog, on 1 May, celebrated Carol Ann Duffy’s appointment as Poet Laureate. Her first poem since then has been published in today’s Guardian. How it makes of your face a stone that aches to weep, of your heart a fist, clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue an iron latch …

And the one millionth English word is…

… “Web 2.0”, according to The Global Language Monitor, which uses statistical techniques to document, analyse and track trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis on Global English. The site is a bit of a hotch-potch, with sections on Politically Correct Speech, Bushisms, Fashion, Hollywood, Obama, the Olympics, and lots more. It …

One million words (well, nearly)

Writing in today’s Telegraph, Simon Winchester celebrates the joys of English, “our truly global language”, which should soon number 1 million words. Here’s his eye-witness account of the moment one of them was created. And so, in every gruesome detail, and in an open-plan Thameslink carriage, I related the saga: the sharpening of the blade, …

Absquatulating snollygosters: the week in politics?

No, don’t worry – I’m not about to turn this blog political (well, maybe just a little bit). The political reference is because I’ve discovered a couple of marvellous web sites for anyone who loves words – old ones crying out to be saved and others that are simply weird and wonderful – and am …

Of [talking] mice and men

The New York Times has been reporting on research by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antropology in Leipzig, where scientists have genetically engineered a strain of mice whose FOXP2 gene [a gene sculpted by natural selection to play an important role in language] has been swapped for the human version. According to the paper, people …

Languages as they is spoke, by Catherine Tate

A little light relief for anyone working or sitting exams on this Spring Bank Holiday. And for long-suffering language teachers! and With thanks to Jill Sommer – I found these links on her Translation Musings blog, where I also learned that today’s a public holiday in the US too: Memorial Day. By Marian Dougan

Begging the question

An e-flyer arrived in my inbox last Thursday from the Italian Tourism Summit organisers. It read: La tripla crisi del turismo italiano: come uscirne, soluzioni e formule 4 June 2009 – Ascoli Piceno Consulta il programma e… …Partecipa! Did this tell me what the triple crisis afflicting Italian tourism is? No, it did not. So …

Translators’ time warp – again

Once again my work days are out of kilter with the rest of the country – it’s a bank holiday here in the UK but business as usual for my clients in Italy. Today, however, my kids are out of synch too – like many of their schoolmates they’ve got Scottish Qualifications Authority exams. Why …

Faster typing and fewer typos

A productivity tip on typing expansion software “From the Desk of David Pogue” at the New York Times. Typing expansion applications work like Microsoft Office’s “AutoCorrect” feature but are system-wide and include a web-address shortening function: “Just copy some huge address, for example, and then type ‘/bitly’ into any program; TextExpander pastes in a tiny …