D3X73R

Happy 10th blogiversary to me! (The internet tells me it's spel{led/t} with one 'g'.) BEFORE ( ISH ) I hope that it also counts as 10 happy years of Separated by a Common Language for you! It has been and continues to be an fantastic ride.  The highlights for me have been: the readers and commenters . Really, it's been amazing to me how wonderful people can be on the web . You hear bad things all the time about social media, but (AmE) knock/ (BrE) touch wood my experiences with it have generally been fabulous. I wrote last year with some emotion about how touched and hono(u)red I am by the generosity of spirit in the comments section. I am. coming to reali{s/z}e how little I knew at the start of the blog (and how little I probably know now) . At that point, I'd been teaching linguistics for 15 years, lived in the UK for over six years and before that I'd lived in South Africa for four. I thought I knew a lot about English. Man, I'd just started to get acqu...

Gemma wrote some time ago to ask about jail and prison , starting with: I would (as a British person) use them interchangeably (is this the norm in the UK, or is it just me?) but I've had the impression on several occasions that an American author has expected me to understand that one (jail?) is used for a regional facility for lesser offenders, and the other for a federal facility. Or perhaps you can set me straight? And who (if anyone) uses the spelling " gaol "? There is indeed a US-UK difference here, almost as Gemma has stated it. Attica Correctional Facility ( Wikipedia ) In the US, jails are where people are taken when they are arrested, and it may be where they stay for a very light sentence. The jail will be run by the county or municipality.   If, after sentencing, the person is to be incarcerated for any significant amount of time, they will be sent to prison . An American prison is not necessarily federal,  there are state prisons as well. Which o...

Today's xkcd is timely... ...considering that Cambridge Linguistics Extra (at Linguist List ) yesterday published a blogpost by me on linguistic misinformation . Click through for more... The post is a promotion for my series in the journal English Today. So far, half of the series has been published--an article on the cognitive biases that colo(u)r our view of other Englishes and one on whether it makes sense to speak of 'British' or 'American' English. The series has allowed me to practi{c/s}e expressing ideas for the book I'm writing .

I'm saddened these days by a lot of things going on in the UK, particularly regarding the current government's treatment of education and healthcare. But, you know, I'm not a Conservative or even a conservative, so it's not surprising I'm not too happy with them. What's moving me to write today is the sadness I feel about aspects of the reaction to what's happening in education. Spot Lynne's (BrE) barnet in the picture A bit of background: the Tory  (BrE) government /(AmE) administration has made and continues to make many changes to schools and education in England. (The other countries of the UK can do their own thing—and as far as I can tell, they're being more sensible.) The changes include a lot more testing of spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG) with more specific and more daunting requirements on grammar at earlier ages. To give a comparison, the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 4-11) mentions grammar (or grammatical ...