Posts by Malie Lalor
My Fair Lady: simple phonetics and pygmalion words
My Fair Lady, a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion, was first performed on Broadway in 1956, and has been in performance somewhere in the world almost ever since. Telling the tale of how London phonetics professor Henry Higgins gives cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle speech lessons in order to pass her [...]
By Jove! The language of P.G. Wodehouse
My dad introduced me to P.G. Wodehouse when I was a teenager. Not for a moment did it occur to him that a 14-year-old girl whose first language was Afrikaans and who had never left the African continent might not find immediate resonance with Bertie Wooster, Lord Ickenham, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Gussie Fink-Nottle, and co., or [...]
Plain English in practice: writing instructions
There are times when clear writing can make the difference between life and death, such as when you’re writing safety instructions. As a language geek, one of my favourite pastimes is reading instructions and notices and thinking of ways to translate them into plainer, clearer English. I find that mentally revising instructions designed to create a safe environment helps to exercise my plain-English muscles: it prepares me for writing everyday emails to colleagues as if the recipients’ lives depended on understanding them. In this post, I’ve had a go at rewriting some safety instructions to make them easier to understand.
Embrace your geekness
Today is ‘Embrace your geekness’ day. In this article we look at the word ‘geek’, pit the geeks against the nerds, and geek out over the Oxford English Corpus – the language analysis tool used by Oxford’s dictionary-makers. The Oxford Dictionaries blog has looked at the word geek before. Of course it has: we openly [...]
Keep calm, and say it plainly
Ever since I first read an ancient edition of Ernest Gowers’ book on plain English about fifteen years ago, I’ve tried to put his guidelines into practice whenever I write. I don’t always get it right – I’m sure you’ll catch me out in this piece of writing – but I always try. What is [...]
A poetic tribute to Dr Seuss
Last week saw the 108th birthday of Dr Seuss, the pen-name of Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991). An American writer of hugely successful books for children, he was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937) introduced Seuss’s iconic visual and verbal style. This was further extended in the [...]
What are ‘Mrs’ and ‘Ms’ short for?
The abbreviations Mr and Mrs are in common use, and are straightforward to pronounce when we see them written down: an approximation would be ‘mister’ and ‘missus’. But what are they abbreviations of? We seldom, if ever, write them out in full – and most of us probably never stop to think what the full versions [...]
All in a day’s work: the days of the week
The Latin days of the week in imperial Rome were named after the planets, which in turn were named after gods. These names were adopted in translated form by the English and other Germanic peoples. In most cases the Germanic names have substituted the Roman god’s name with that of a comparable one from the [...]
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![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")
