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Crisis = clanger + hypothesis
There is a much-repeated linguistic canard that the Chinese word for crisis combines the characters for danger and opportunity. It doesn’t really, but the popularity of this misconception testifies to...
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Rare “rere” rears its head in Ireland
Here is an unusual spelling: rere for rear. The word probably derives from the Old French rere, rier, from Latin retro (back, behind). The Oxford English Dictionary describes rere as obsolete except...
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Grammar to go
I saw this sign through the door of a fast food restaurant in Galway: The use of double negatives to express a single negation (I didn’t do nothin’; I can’t get no satisfaction) is sometimes criticised...
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The limits of pruning
The perimeter of a garden not far from where I live was lined, until recently, with mature evergreen trees. They numbered about a dozen: tall, beautiful, and busy with songbirds and various other life...
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No play, no plurals
I should know better than to be surprised by the language used on signs, but the phrase “Ball sports is prohibited” struck me as a remarkable singularisation. Did the parties responsible start with...
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A contradictory undertaking
. Will this lead to a state of limbo? Filed under: humour, Ireland, photography, signs Tagged: funeral, humour, Ireland, logic, paradox, photography, puns, puzzles, signs, undertakers, urban photography
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The Glottal Stop Hotel
I am tempted to hoist a /ʔ/ into the gap: The glottal stop, which you hear between the vowels in uh-oh and in some pronunciations of water, is a sound familiar to most people but seldom referred to...
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‘Emphatic’ quotation marks and consonant doubling
I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, one on errant punctuation and one on a sometimes tricky aspect of spelling and morphology. The ‘emphatic’ use of quotation marks summarises...
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Language police: check your privilege and priorities
Earlier this year Ragan.com published an article titled “15 signs you’re a word nerd”. Alongside a couple of unobjectionable items (You love to read; You know the difference between “e.g.” and “i.e.”)...
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Communicating with the distant future
It’s sobering to imagine modern English as an archaic dialect – how the language might evolve and how our version(s) of it might appear from a position many generations into the future. That English...
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The Tironian et (⁊) in Galway, Ireland
Over the door of the Warwick Hotel in Salthill, Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, sits a very old and unusual typographical mark. Between Beár (bar) and Bialann (restaurant) there is a Tironian et...
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Banned words and flat adverbs
‘Banning’ words is not an impulse I can relate to. My recent post at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, The vogue for banning words, takes issue with this popular practice: Lists of words to ban make effective...
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Bicycles (or other)
The photo below shows the western end of the prom in Salthill, a popular walking route near where I live in Galway. It’s local tradition to kick the wall on the right before turning around and...
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