D3X73R

A few days ago I was heard to tweet: Reading a lot of genl-audience books re language these days. My rule: buy the books by sensible ppl, borrow the icky ones from library. 1/ — Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) 26 August 2016 You can thus tell how sensible I find Oliver Kamm on the matter, since I seem to have accidentally bought two copies of his Accidence will happen: the non-pedantic guide to English . (No publishers' freebies here. Just a poorly organi{s/z}ed bookcase and an eagerness to support my local independent (BrE) bookshop /(AmE) bookstore .) What's more fun than taking a spare book to the (BrE) charity shop ? Having strangers attempt to amuse me in an effort to win a free book, that's what. I've had a competition before where I asked for limericks on the subject of British/American linguistic differences. You can't beat a rhyme. But that was seven years ago, so I think I can dare to almost repeat myself. For a chance to win a copy of the paperback edition o...

Fellow American-linguist-in-Britain Chris Kim mentioned to me the British use of If I'm honest as a discourse-commentary-type idiom, where she would more naturally say To be honest . By 'discourse-commentary-type idiom', I mean: it's a set phrase that the speaker uses to indicate their stance with respect to what they're saying in the rest of the sentence. As in: I think to be honest , like most people would be, he was extremely p***** off with the idea of being ill so soon after retiring! [ Mirror.co.uk ] "It makes me a bit nervous, to be honest , and I am handling her with little gloves at the moment because I am not sure how far to push.”[Brendan Cole on Victoria Pendleton in The Telegraph ] I reckon I see about one production of it every year. Most of them, if I’m honest , aren’t great. But they keep being staged: audiences can’t seem to get enough of Greek tragedy.  [ Natalie Haynes in The Independent ] I'd very much been 'out' as a forme...

Last month Linguist Laura wrote a blog post congratulating the students who were graduating from her program(me). She discusses graduate , then moves on to alumni , excerpted below. I've highlighting the bit that was news to me. My undergraduate alma mater Go Minutemen! Go Minutewomen! When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another Latin word. It's plural, in that form, and pedants will have know[n] that the singular is alumnus  or alumna , depending on whether you're male or female. Again, this is a bit annoying for English speakers who don't really bother that much with gender other than pronouns, [...] Normal procedure when removing gender distinction is to go with the male for everyone: actors and actresses become actors, lady doctors become doctors, and so on. With alumni , we're taking to using the plural form for everyone. You're an alumni once you graduate. This ever so slightly grates on me but I am a good linguist...