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Mom vs mam, and Americanisms in Irish English
I was recently approached by the Irish Independent newspaper for comment on the influence of American English and pop culture on Irish English speech. The resulting article, by journalist Tanya...
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Unlikely syntax will lead to clarity
This Reuters story about monkeypox, published on 30 May 2022, has an unfortunate ambiguity in its headline: The same headline appeared on sites syndicating the report, like Yahoo! News and Nasdaq, and...
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Joyce County by Ray Burke
It was a hundred years ago, in 1922, that James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. Joyce famously set the novel over the course of a day in Dublin; his connections with Galway, a smaller...
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Headline trials halted
This headline appeared on the front page of the Guardian website last weekend and came to my attention via Mercedes Durham on Twitter: Vaccine trials halted after patient fell ill restart It’s quite...
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That puzzling omission
The following line appeared in a recent article in the Guardian: Researchers who questioned more than 90,000 adults found “complete” compliance with government safety measures, such as physical...
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Science-writing tips from Cormac McCarthy
The science journal Nature recently published tips from author Cormac McCarthy on ‘how to write a great science paper’. Though familiar with McCarthy’s novels,* I hadn’t known about his work elsewhere,...
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Book review: ‘Talk on the Wild Side’ by Lane Greene
Language today is partly tame and partly wild, and the two will always be in tension. —Lane Greene, Talk on the Wild Side It’s funny how many people profess to love the English language yet express...
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Being bold in Irish English
In standard English the primary meaning of the adjective bold is ‘brave, courageous, unafraid, daring’. This can shade into a related, negative sense of impudence, brazenness, or presumption. Another...
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Defuse/diffuse, hanged/hung, and killer emoji
At Macmillan Dictionary Blog, where I write a monthly column about language, I’ve been discussing moral panics and tricky pairs of words. Diffusion of confusion looks at defuse and diffuse and derived...
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Cybersecurity Style Guide is a useful editing tool
Most people reading this will have partial or passive familiarity with some terminology from programming, information security, and related domains, but they may have just a hazy grasp of how they’re...
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On foot of an Irish idiom
In a comment on my post about 12 Irish English usages, Margaret suggested that I write about the Irish expression on foot of. It was a good idea: the phrase is not widely known outside Ireland and is...
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“Whom”: to reprise
Here’s a curious incident at the NYT, courtesy of author and economist Paul Krugman. On Twitter yesterday, Krugman mentioned an upcoming article and attempted to forestall criticism of its headline’s...
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Passive voice peeving and ignorance
Despite all the solid, readily available information on the passive voice, there remains a great deal of misinformation and confusion about it. This confusion, far from being limited to...
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Fear and loathing of the passive voice
A great many people are unsure what the passive voice is, and what (if anything) is wrong with it. That wouldn’t be such a problem, except that a lot of those people misidentify and misrepresent the...
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Hypercorrect ‘as’ for ‘like’
I tweeted about this a couple of months ago and have been meaning to follow up ever since. The item that interests me is a usage in the subhead of an article from Brussels-based news service Politico....
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Almost vs. nearly — the order of approximations
Among the pleasures of Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s writing manual The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (1943) is their attempt to put some order on phrases of...
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Fears crawling, crash blossoming
This headline on the front page of today’s Guardian caught my eye for reasons both ecological and syntactic. See what you make of it before reading on: In normal prose it might read: There are fears...
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Numbnuts, hashtags, and refutations
I normally report on my posts for Macmillan Dictionary Blog about once a month. But because I took a short break from blogging here, I have three to share instead of the usual two. The first reflects...
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Accent prejudice and multiple hyphens
Time to recap my recent posts for Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Anti-multiple-hyphen tendencies considers the strangely common aversion to ‘hyphenating up’ such compounds as self-driving car fantasists...
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Whom’s Law of Hypercorrection
I won’t subject readers to another long, rambling post on whom. But I want to note the tendency, strongest among those who are anxious to use whom “correctly”, to use it even when who would be...
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