linguistlaura

I've just finished reading a book called 'Statistics without tears' by Derek Rowntree. It's a basic tutorial on statistical ...

Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?' by Gyles Brandreth I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma?...

The snowclone 'Worst. X. Ever' (from the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons) is easy enough: just substitute X with whatever it is you...

As you know, I'm learning German and dabbling in Esperanto. Esperanto is primarily based on romance languages as far as the vocabulary g...

For those that don't know, the Oxford comma (or serial comma) is the comma that can come before 'and' in a list. I was taugh...

Michael Gove has been the subject of this blog in the past . These days, he's no longer Education bod and is now Lord Chancellor, if you...

Associated Press caused a twitter hoo-ha when they mistakenly led a lot of their followers to think that there had been yet another air cra...

We're all getting quite good at spotting email spam now. Our filters are pretty clever and get rid of all the obvious stuff anyway, so t...

Lately I've seen two very effective uses of scare quotes - the quotation marks you put round a word or phrase to indicate to your reade...

I recently treated myself to this book for the princely sum of 5p (plus £2.80 delivery from America - really,  you can't say fairer tha...

I saw this image on the internets illustrating this poor chap's inability to use commas (and knowledge of the difference between the sp...

I tutor students on writing skills in order to not starve to death in a garret while I write my PhD. Most of the time they have problems wit...

Yes - I know. It's a deliberate mistake. Anyway, this is a screenshot from something on TV (via Tony Tooke ): As you can see, thi...

I did know that some of them existed, actually. The full list is here . It's an annoyingly ad-full page but worth persevering with to le...