linguistlaura

 Please enjoy this nice linguistic observation made by someone on twitter:  The pronunciation of “plantain” When a word has the suffix “-tai...

All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb lead , which is standardly spelt led , dead. Or ded. I'd...

Advice about keeping a blog always says not to apologise for not writing for a while, because no one will really notice, so just write whate...

Starbucks is featured on this blog often enough lately that I'm starting to think I should ask for a promotional fee (for the record, I ...

Anyway, back to linguistics after all the disquisitions on the state of HE. Susie Dent posted a nice fun fact about the word two  on twitter...

On my way home from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting last week, this advert on the train (too late, I was already...

In the recent series of University Challenge: The Professionals , shown at Christmas time, Jeremy Paxman asked a question involving a gnu. A...

Another thing I watched over Christmas was a repeat of A Touch of Cloth , a comedy detective series by Charlie Brooker. There's a charac...

It's no surprise when a newspaper publishes an article about language and fails to ask a linguist. They rarely do. It's even less of...

[Sorry - this is a short and rushed post. It's Week 0.] I was reminded the other day (because I mentioned it) that I only recently dis...

(from Viz)

This has bugged me for years. There's this acronym on the window of a building I pass at Northumbria University: I've sort of...

I read a really nice piece in the Bangkok Post this week (yeah, I'm global). It was written by an Australian, as far as I can gather fr...

In this week's Radio Times, the actress Penelope Keith gets worked up about the pronunciation of certain words:  If I hear 'la men...

I stumbled across the phrase an hypothesis in a book yesterday and it gave me pause. Surely, I thought to myself, that can't be right? ...

I'm having some trouble with my mobile phone tariff at the moment, and I rang up the other day to ask how it's going. The woman I sp...