linguistlaura

As you know, I'm a big fan of just listening out for interesting linguistic usages, anything that catches the ear or eye. So recently, w...

I've held off on blogging about Wordle, because everyone else did it, and because I didn't have anything particular to say. People t...

How many times do you need to use a word in one piece of writing or speech before it's too many?  In the novel 'We' by Yevgeny Z...

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.] You should always learn...

I always think of dictionaries as like a huge, slow-moving (but graceful) sea creature, a sort of enormous beast like the avanc in Mieville...

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

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...

The Morris group that I dance with did some workshops for some Dutch children this week. One of the girls said that the evening was gezellig...

I spent a couple of days this week at a philosophy conference. It was really interesting, especially as some of the talks were about the phi...

There's an interesting blog called ' Ten hundred words of science ', in which people try to explain their research using only t...

In the book '48 hours' by J Jackson Bentley (a fairly crappy crime thriller), forensic corpus linguistics turned up. In the book, a ...

In my first-year introductory seminar, I had the students coming up with new onomatopoeic words, which we then tried to guess the meaning of...

I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and watched a truly horrific programme called 'The Call Centre'. It's a 'structured re...

My grandma got an ipad recently (which means that now she reads this blog: hello Rosemary!). I was playing with it a while back and one of t...

You may remember that I did a talk for the Centre for Lifelong Learning's Explore programme last year, as part of a training exercise ...

There's been a spate of ableist language in my life this week (that is, language that discriminates against people with disabilities). ...

Aw, look, I just noticed this reference to 'person-in-charge' on my fire safety instructions. What a cute construction.

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at na...

Some people have noticed that the search bar on facebook looks like this, and suggested an improvement: They think it should read ...

There are lots of expressions, mostly with quantifiers ( all , every etc.), that can be written as one word or two. Generally, it makes a d...