Tag: Language
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Ill Bread
I stumbled into Subway today, and after I had ordered two footling subs, the counter droid queried whether I wanted anything else with my sandwiches. I was momentarily stunned, as I hadn’t ordered any sandwiches. Then it thunderbolted home: another cockwomble retailer within their own warped virtual reality bubble was dicking around with the English…
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Wordsworths
It’s a rum old thing, and one that confounds linguists, but there’s an inherent paradox in language. When we communicate a message, the logic of the sentence will often have little bearing on how it will be interpreted. Audiences bring their fears, preferences, and very often their psychoses to the table, and then home in…
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Meddle Ceremony
I am a fan of etymology and the origins of words, but I have always known that they might sometimes be susceptible to the incorporation of urban legends. This false etymology, as linguists term it, sometimes takes the form of outwardly reasonable explanations that are essentially flawed or backronyms (acronyms that are contrived to provide…
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Slang Ban, Thank You Ma’am!
As if a truckload of horsehit about a 50p piece being bereft of an Oxford comma wasn’t enough, a linguistics expert from some august institution has broached the subject of whether schools should ban the use of street slang such as peng and bruv. Apparently, teachers are correcting students’ use of street argot in classes…
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Let’s Eat, Grandma…
While we appear to be teetering on the edge of World War III (or at least that’s what you might be led to believe from certain online sources), I have been grappling with a far greater foe. English grammar. Now, I’ve always been somewhat a stickler for grammatical rules. And I’ve previously written in an…
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