Word trends and new words
Lily-white hands and scarlet gowns: formulas in British traditional ballads
Traditional song can be a tricky beast. Stubbornly slippery in form, content, and definition, its remit encompasses an amorphous mass of vernacular songs that have been cherished by everyday people over time. These songs are of varying vintages, of both known and unknown authorship, some passed through generations by word of mouth, others emerging from [...]
Chasing the rainbow connection
Reflect and refract When was the last time you looked out the window and said, “Oh look! There’s a many-coloured refraction of light from drops of water!”? Well – OK, if you said that last week then feel free to skip the next paragraph, but most of us refer to the sudden splash of colours [...]
Do we need the apostrophe?
“The apostrophe is the most troublesome punctuation mark in English, and perhaps also the least useful. No other punctuation mark causes so much bewilderment, or is so often misused.” R.L. Trask, The Penguin Guide to Punctuation The recent decision by Devon County Council to drop the apostrophe from its road signs was met with dismay and anger [...]
Spanish Internet terms – how to fill gaps in a language
Back when I was at school learning Standard Grade Spanish, the only computing word that we needed to know was ordenador, the word for the computer itself. While the Internet was becoming an increasingly useful adjunct to our lives, it was still something of a side issue, rather than the can’t-imagine-life-without-it behemoth that it is [...]
Le Geek, C’est Chic
The Glorious 25 May, in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, is a day for wearing lilacs to celebrate the People’s Revolution. The 25th is also Towel Day, commemorating the life and works of Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy celebrated the towel as ‘the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have’. Furthermore, the [...]
Beam me up, dictionary: Star Trek in the OED
Star Trek is one of the most successful science-fiction franchises of all time: since the original TV series first aired in 1966, there have been four further live-action TV shows (plus an animated series), twelve films, and innumerable books. Only Star Wars and (particularly for the British) Doctor Who have achieved a comparable level of [...]
Apple Corps to Beatlemania: the language of The Beatles
The Beatles are regarded by many – including me – as the greatest band of all time, and few would doubt the significance of their impact on popular music. Their impact on the lexicon is less clear, though, since using the word ‘na’ 217 times in the lyrics of Hey Jude really doesn’t count. (Incidentally, [...]
Facebook: a language
Today is Mark Zuckerberg’s 29th birthday – yes, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook is still under thirty. Facebook turned nine this February, which is surprisingly young given its influence upon the English language. It is my part-time addiction to Facebook, and not, I hasten to add, my degree in English, that has qualified me [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (27)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (121)
- English in use (316)
- Grammar and writing help (59)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (55)
- Varieties of English (30)
- Word origins (161)
- Word trends and new words (96)
