English Language Facts and Fascinations

A lifelong love of English language quirks and oddities, errors and antics: semantic slippages, grammatical gruesomosities and morphological monstrosities... Things I notice in my editing, my English teaching, and in everyday life.

Friday, 26 August 2016

“We beat them up, didn’t we!”

“We beat them up, didn’t we!” A few days ago a group of us decided to visit a mediaeval castle on a high and very steep hill overlookin...

Wednesday, 24 August 2016

Tagged!

Tagged! I’ve really been noticing this word recently… and have been watching the evolving use of both the base word ‘tag’ and ‘tagged’. ...

Friday, 5 August 2016

‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ at the Rio Olympics?

For a long time, I've found the use of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ to refer to adults as pretty irritating and belittling – not when used in a...

Friday, 29 July 2016

Changing Language

I was fascinated recently to learn that 'other' is now being used—by sociologists, psychologists and so on—as a verb, and we also no...

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