I knew this would happen – the minute I blog about spelling, I make a spelling mistake on Twitter. The tweet was about creative and tech-savvy CV ideas, as featured in the Huffington Post. An area, I commented, where Elle Woods of Legally Blond Blonde led the way with her Harvard application on video. That’ll …
Category archives: Language
Spelling bees in my bonnet (1)
I work with language, so it goes without saying (I hope) that I care about spelling. That said, I don’t think texting heralds the death of the English language and I don’t fall from my chair with horror if an email or text arrives with minor spelling mistakes. Indeed, I think texting and Twitterese are new …
Spelling “speling”
This morning’s “Call Kaye” programme on BBC Radio Scotland featured an interview with Richard Lawrence Wade, whose “Free Speling” campaign aims to help English “break out of the cage [of spelling] that’s been holding us all prisoners for over 250 years”. Richard isn’t proposing a spelling free-for-all: his goal is to modernise English and create …
The demise of Borders UK
I visited Borders UK’s Glasgow store a few days ago, feeling like a vulture as I filled my basket with cut-price books (TimeOut travel guides, IT (Mac) user-guides and English language reference books. Plus two novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard for my daughter).To my surprise I found myself feeling sad and nostalgic at the store’s …
Localisation, Kiwi style.
I received an email recently from BT encouraging me to sign up to the Terminate the Rate campaign. This aims to end the fee applied to landline calls to mobile phones, or to calls from mobiles to users on a different network. My first reaction was suspicion – a utilities company urging me to join …
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 …
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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 …
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