Language
-
I've always thought that it's slightly odd to open a sentence with "To be honest." The implication is that being honest is a departure from your usual practice. Yes, of course, I understand that it means you're telling the other person something he or she may not want to hear, and which in the normal
-
Sometimes I get tired of being a curmudgeon regarding various current phenomena in the continual flux that is the English language. I'm pretty sure my wife is tired of it, too–of hearing me grumble, for instance, about how annoying the word "iconic" has become in recent years. (But then I don't think she pays much
-
A couple of days ago someone added a comment on an old post in which there was some discussion of the correct pronunciation of "slough." Three possible pronunciations were mentioned there: rhymes with "cow"; sounds like "slew"; rhymes with "puff." Out of curiosity, I did a search for "how do you pronounce slough" and got
-
Ok, this is not a post about books or music, which is what I said at the beginning of this year that I would stick to. But it's not very far removed: it's about developments in language, English in particular. This is something I notice a lot, mainly when it's a development that irritates me,
-
Something which begins as a mild annoyance can become infuriating or maddening if it goes on long enough. Such is my reaction to the contemporary use of the word "iconic." At first it was applied to fairly significant things that over some fairly lengthy period of time have become a part of our cultural furniture:
-
…have seen the end of war." A quick search finds that sunny observation attributed to Plato and to Santayana, which is an awfully wide chronological range. I did not learn it from any such noble source, but rather as the name of an album by an Iraqi heavy metal group, Acrassicauda ("a black desert scorpion").
-
"They might, he said, come out to Vienna." That's from the Auden biography I'm reading. It's 1937 (I think) and "they" is Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It always amuses me that the English seem generally to refer to any travel abroad as going "out." The direction doesn't matter: out to Canada, out to Australia. And
-
Last September I lamented that the "lie-lay" distinction seems to be a lost cause. Joining it now, I think, are certain uses of "obsess" and "cliché." I've recently come across sentences like these in the writing of two forty-ish (I think) people, both very well educated, one of them a Ph.D: I am obsessing about
-
(Does Ireland count as part of the British Isles? I wouldn't think they'd be very pleased about that.) I saw this on Facebook, then went looking for it on YouTube so that I could post it here. I was surprised to see that there are a number of videos of the same basic type. There's
-
I’m actually not a grammar martinet, although it may sometimes seem that way. I’ve never paid a lot of attention to rules of grammar, not in the sense of being able to state them, and talk of verb tenses and such usually confuses me. It’s just a matter of what sounds right or wrong, very
Light On Dark Water 