My observations on the Decay of Language have made it to the Independent, albeit in a somewhat truncated and mysterious form, ie leaving out the bits about No 10’s spelling incompetence and not making it clear that the opening passages were not by me but from a reader. Still, the main point […]
Remember all those eggcorns? A nice one in Telegraph Mobile today: European shares endure their worst week in almost a year as investors speculate whether Eurozone countries will tow the line. Whereas in fact it should be … Meanwhile over at Plane Stupid: The appointment puts BAA in an incredibly strong position […]
My latest Eggcorn posting ended thusly: Isn’t a language like anything else? Without proper care and attention it just decays? An eagle-eyed reader in Greece asked whether I had meant to add the question-mark. I replied that I had put it in to nod in the direction of the thought […]
Perusing the website of the British High Commission in Malta (as of course one does) I found this link to a letter written by PM Gordon Brown to Dr Alan Williams MP of the Liaison Committee on the way forward after the Copenhagen Climate Change summit. It also is on the […]
Is hosted again by a Very British dude with his beautiful eyes. He looks at the genre. Thus: Blogging is not new – it is pamphleteering and essaying with modern technology. Early Modern Whale, for example examines a 16th Century pamphlet about a landslip in Kent, and talks about the writer using this phenomenon to […]
What makes writing good or bad? Not always easy to tell. But if the writer is known to be a Great Writer, does it matter? Try this gripping sentence: The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had […]
Welcome Iain Dale readers Update: A good piece in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins on the wider politics of all this. Max Atkinson suggests (see Comments below) that the Sun‘s use of this story is ‘fishy’. So what if it is? Labour have enjoyed the Sun’s vivid support for many […]
One of the typical BBC-style clever retorts to those who say that our language is not declining goes thus: Languages evolve, as we all know. They have to. Duh. English now is far removed from the language of Henry I. If technology and texting and the rest are causing English […]
Just back from manoeuvres in Liverpool, addressing this years’s Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (the gathering of leading public schools, primarily for boys) most ably led this year by Andrew Grant from my old school. My zany theme was Why Stupidity Should Be Taught In Schools, a subject on which I felt […]
Remember that great film starring Peter Sellers? This is not about that. Rather it is to pick up a comment posted by our old friend Ivor (at least I think it is ‘Ivor’ – s/he again cunningly leaves no email trail) on my observations about Neil Craig’s claim that I […]
