Clearly, one can’t use the f-word in a film primarily made for children. Circumventing swearwords, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox has given us such gems as bull-cuss, cusshole, cluster-cuss, hyper-cussing-active… You scared the cuss out of us! … you mangy, cussing little cuss! … Let’s kick some fox cuss!
Continue readingWhen it comes to language, like Neo, we really should take the red pill
The green symbols cascading down a black screen represents what holds the world of The Matrix together. The digital rain can represent the limits of our language and cognitive abilities, and what awaits when we take the red pill – near-complete control of English.
Continue readingWhat the heck does ‘yeet’ mean?
Merriam and others don’t simply yeet a new word into the dictionary when they first encounter it. They wait for “sustained, meaningful, widespread use”.
Continue readingSome great familects from two films and a TV series
These extracts of dialogue from the inimitable Sin City, A Clockwork Orange, and The Wire are great examples of how incredibly eloquent familect words and phrases (neologisms) can be.
Continue readingSo, why do we use ‘hello’ as a conversation-starter?
While OK is the most spoken word on the planet, hello is the English word that most people learn first. It was popularised by the adoption of the telephone. Here’s a brief history.
Continue readingSemantic superheroes are taking to the streets
Under cover of night, volunteers with a shared purpose criss-cross their city. They’re not revolutionaries; they’re people who love grammar. Inserting accents, commas and question marks, and removing erroneous ones, they correct the language shortcomings of poets in training and unrequited lovers.
Continue reading‘The New Yorker’ magazine and the fixations of its outlier house style
The weekly magazine The New Yorker is well known for its cartoons, journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, photography, poetry, crosswords and puzzles. But it’s also known for its “distractingly idiosyncratic” house style. “Nöw yöu knöw”.
Continue readingA round of applause for conjunctions!
Conjunctions are one of the nine primary parts of speech in English. They are so useful! They’re function words – they live to serve: to join, coordinate and contrast. Complete control of these beauties will totally transform our writing.
Continue readingGosh, there’s a word for that!
The number and variety of new words is astonishing! On 13 February 2024, in its winter update, Dictionary.com announced more than 1,700 new entries and revisions. I’ve chosen just 23: Barbiecore, enshittification, girl dinner, mid, bussin’, the ick, bed rotting, pretty privilege, boring billion, shacket, cozy, girl mom, squish, dry powder, bag holder, extreme heat event, intimate partner violence, supervised injection site, food insecure, energy poverty, worlding, fakeness and boobne.
Continue readingGertrude Stein, joy, and writing as thinking in flow
Gertrude Stein’s How to write is an initially confounding yet extraordinary book. She argues and shows that thinking, feeling and writing occur at the same time: “The business of Art… is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present”. When writing, she wants us to begin, to begin again, to begin again and again, to experience joy in writing’s purpose – that is, to focus on writing as thinking.
Continue readingWhat are your favourite words for 2023?
Every year, various online dictionaries, publishers and magazines choose words that, owing to their hyper-frequent usage, encapsulate a year. For 2023, Oxford’s was rizz; Cambridge’s was hallucinate. Merriam-Webster’s words included authentic, deepfake, coronation, dystopian, EGOT, implode, doppelgänger, covenant, indict, elemental, kibbutz and deadname. And there’s more…
Continue readingSteven Pinker’s how-to guide is a jewel
We owe Pinker a debt of gratitude. His 2014 book The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century is a wonderful grammar/syntax/style/usage guide. If you don’t already own it, please gift it to yourself. Anything but dry and boring, it’s clear, engaging and witty – “a worthy addition to any writer’s library… full of gems”.
Continue readingAbstracts 2.0: Do your abstracts sing?
Given the time, effort and resources that go into great research, it would be a pity to drop the ball in the abstract – in light of its many key roles. A “taste of the pie”, it should represent a manuscript 100%. Effectively summarising research usually involves repeated rewriting. Because time pressure is always a factor, the risk is that the abstract is rushed.
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