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Maar is het fout? (But is it wrong?)
Here is Annemarie Walop‘s second blog post. While browsing on the internet a few weeks ago, I found a very interesting article on the website of Dutch quality newspaper De Volkskrant about the Dutch...
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Are Americanisms taking over the British Language?
Below follows Jan van den Berg’s first blogpost: “American influence is busily eroding a valuable and once firm distinction in British speech and writing” (Amis 1997: 11). This is a quotation from...
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Bennett’s Wordfinder
This is an index to the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, based on the version revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (1965). Paul Bennett has written elsewhere on this blog, about Fowler’s...
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A vintage copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary
I always thought this is what the COD looked like: Until yesterday, when I found a lovely, what might be described as a vintage copy of the book on the Free Books Table we have on the second floor of …...
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Fowler’s Modern English Usage: new but not New
It was February 1997, and Robert Burchfield’s The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage had been out for three months. Just as the 1st and 2nd editions of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage came to be...
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Dahlesque got in, so how about Fowleresque?
Two weeks ago, NRC-Handelsblad published an article on the memorable fact that among their new entries, the Oxford English Dictionary adopted words made up by Roald Dahl (1916-1990). The OED as a news...
View ArticleGuess what?! You don’t just speak a dialect; you’re also illiterate and...
And here is Ilse Stolte’s second blogpost, on a topic related to the first one she wrote about: For the course on Non-Standard English and prescriptivism, I spend a great deal of time reading through...
View ArticleUsage guides… there’s no getting away from them!
Yesterday, I found this well-worn copy of Margaret Nicholson’s A Dictionary of American-English Usage (Signet 1958) in my local street library (see photo below) just around the corner of where I live....
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