Tag archives: descriptive
When does ‘wrong’ become ‘right’?
People can go a bit funny when I tell them I edit dictionaries for a living. They get nervous and hesitant, as if they’re expecting me to leap on them at any moment, mock their use of grammar, laugh cruelly at their mispronunciations, and pour scorn on their woefully limited vocabulary. But nothing could be [...]
Is it OK to use ‘hopefully’ as a sentence adverb?
This past week saw a small explosion of anguished queries and dire proclamations in a number of newspaper headlines. “Is This the End of Proper Grammar?” asked the New York Times, and, not to be outdone, the Minnesota Daily trumpeted that the “AP Stylebook seeks to destroy the American way of life”. An article in [...]
Truly. Madly. Deep.
A few years ago, I became unusually vocal over a particular bit of linguistic abuse. Unusually, because the lexicographical instinct is to be descriptive of language change at all times, and sanguine about those bugbears that others decry. But this particular trend had me sufficiently riled that I wrote an article entitled ‘The Adverb is [...]
To describe or prescribe, that is the question (with apologies to Shakespeare)
Regular readers of this blog may remember a recent poll in which we posed the following question: Do you think dictionaries should: Describe language as it is being used Prescribe how language should be used Be a mixture of prescriptive and descriptive The results were as follows: 70.27 % were in favour of a mixture, [...]
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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")
