Posts by John W. List
The challenges of learning a language as an adult
Ah, my teenage years! Spandex-clad 1980s rockers on 7-inch vinyl records, Senna and Mansell winning Formula One races, learning to code on a Sinclair Spectrum, and watching The A-Team, Dempsey and Makepeace, or Cagney and Lacey on the TV. Imagine, only four channels! And school. I can’t say I liked school a lot, being a [...]
Doin’ it your own way
As a result of my job and my interests I follow a lot of logophiles, copywriters, proof readers, and harmless drudges through my social media accounts. One group among those I follow are the style guides for various different media organisations organizations, people whose job it is to ensure that writing appearing under the name of [...]
Making a marque: automotive etymologies
On a recent cloudy Sunday afternoon I found myself shepherding the truck-crazy young son of a friend of mine round the crowded arena of a retro and classic truck show at a motor museum in the English Midlands. There were hundreds of trucks of all ages and manufacturers neatly parked in rows and we walked [...]
Java, C, and Python: the etymology of programming languages
As a software developer for most of my adult life, I have a CV that is covered in acronyms and initialisms representing technologies I have mastered. Well, to be more honest, some technologies I have mastered, others I have used a lot, and a few I’ve had brief exposure to but which look good on [...]
How Telstar changed history: celebrating 50 years since the launch of the first communication satellite
It is something we take for granted, that we can turn on our television in the morning and watch the news and sport as it unfolds on the other side of the world. From my home here in Oxford, I have watched the Arab Spring, the Chilean mine rescue, the Euro 2012 football, and thousands [...]
I was Country when Country wasn’t cool
Over a decade ago I experienced something of an epiphany. On a long drive under the endlessly wide skies of the Canadian prairie, I tired of the bland AOR from the FM stations on my hire car’s radio so I flipped over to AM and started listening to the first station I found, which was [...]
ELIZA: a real example of a Turing test
As part of our marking the centenary of Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst, and progenitor of computer science, we wanted to provide you with a demonstration of one of the areas in which his work has had an influence on the English language. The Turing test, ‘a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a [...]
From CAPTCHA to morphogen: how Alan Turing has influenced modern English
23 June 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, 20th century mathematician and computer scientist. Turing is most famous today for his cryptanalysis work during World War II in which he and others at Bletchley Park broke the German Enigma ciphers and created the first electronic computers. But his influence stretches far [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (26)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (116)
- English in use (304)
- Grammar and writing help (58)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (50)
- Varieties of English (28)
- Word origins (156)
- Word trends and new words (93)
![Who's confident [confidant?] about using -ance, -ence, and](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/ant-ent-60x60.jpg "Who's confident [confidant?] about using -ance, -ence, and")
