Whether you’re miffed, waffling, ticket-boo or taking the Mickey, the English language is full of words with odd derivations. Just don’t pop your clogs before reading this…
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Tag: Language
The 8 longest words in English
The longest word in the English language is a whisker under 190,000 letters long and would take over an hour[…]
Read moreFamous Razors
Razors aren’t just for shaving. In philosophy, a razor is a rule of thumb that allows for the elimination (the[…]
Read more“A little lesbian joke …”
The Bechdel test — sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test — began as “a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist[…]
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Context is everything! Cats and dogs in the Bible
I spotted this quote in a magazine this week … “The dog is mentioned in the Bible 18 times —[…]
Read moreCheck your popularity with n-grams
Y’all know about n-grams, right? Wikipedia nails ’em: … an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given[…]
Read moreStephen Fry vs. Grammar nazis
Interesting origins
The derivation of well-known words and phrases. Many familiar English words and phrases have interesting derivations, and because Britain was[…]
Read more5 English language myths
The problem — and the delight — of the English language is that there is no such thing as Standard[…]
Read moreSecret writer’s tools – The G&O Style Guide
Pacman or Pac-Man? Phony or phoney? Post-modern or postmodern? At some point in your writing you’re going to need a[…]
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