My monthly newsletters
Why read and subscribe? Because the alphabet is a gift, literacy is a miracle, and English has more facets than a diamond masterly cut into a round brilliant. Much pleasure awaits…
2 December 2025
When you say this name slowly, what do you hear? Saul Goodman
In which you can learn what ‘nomenclator’ means, be introduced to the art of naming a character, and find out (via Hegel) how to avoid an end-of-the-world view or blind trust in ‘progress’ or History.
30 October 2025
An ode to Gertrude Stein, and some of her scintillating sentences
Gertrude Stein’s work is most unusual – playful, fearlessly experimental, oblique, joyous, rich in vocabulary, sparse in punctuation, thoughtful, enigmatic, sometimes far-fetched.
2 October 2025
Murphy’s law and the proofreading trickster (aka Muphry’s law)
No doubt you’ve heard of Murphy’s law. There are many variations. There’s one for printed and published material, coined in 1992: Muphry’s law or the proofreading trickster… [Erratum: Murphy’s law dates to the 20th century, not the 19th.]
4 September 2025
So, why does ‘mother’ sound so similar in so many languages?
The many cross-language and intra-language variants of ‘mom’ (one of 23 ‘ultra-conserved’ words) do not trace back to a singular mother tongue. 😀 So, where do they all come from? Mom “belongs to a dialect far more universal than a single protolanguage”.
6 August 2025
So, is the word pronounced pA-del, paddle or pah-DEL?
Padel enthusiasts rave about its benefits. It’s considered a great way stay active, have fun and meet people. But how does one pronounce it? Clue: Padel has its origins in Spanish.
3 July 2025
The efforts to keep endangered languages alive
Of the current 7,000 languages in the world, around 43% are endangered, and many others will become so in the near future. While many ‘rememberers’ are dying, some languages are being resurrected…
3 June 2025
So, what are malaphors? These lexical chimeras are funtastic!
They’re not spoonerisms, bon mots or puns. Some have called them malamanteaux or portmanpropisms. Douglas Hofstadter is a fan, and reportedly has a file of thousands.
6 May 2025
Metaphors – helping us to develop our English into maturity since who-knows-when
Is English a vast ocean, a puzzle, a dance, a bridge, a toolbox, a symphony, a magic carpet, a web, a garden, a roadmap or a treasure chest? But wait, there are many, many more…
1 April 2025
No buts about it, the word ‘but’ can mean trouble
While the conjunction but can also function as an adverb or a noun, it is sometimes used incorrectly or ineffectively, doing oneself and others a disservice. Here are some alternatives: and, now, while, or, so, for, nor, yet…
4 March 2025
An ode to Esperanto and its ideal of a universal language for all of humankind
Given that around 7,111 languages are spoken today, why make a new one? While some dismiss it as an eccentric hobby for language nerds, Esperanto has played important roles in the world.
4 February 2025
What are your favourite words of the year for 2024?
Every year, the world’s major dictionaries identify the most often searched for words. Here’s some for 2024: brain rot (Oxford), manifest (Cambridge), polarization (Merriam-Webster), quishing, resenteeism, brat, Goldilocks, ecotarian, pander, allision, demure, cognitive, slop, romantasy and lore. Macqarrie’s is enshittification – the decline of a product or service, particularly online.
14 January 2025
Getting to ‘in press’: Manuscript acceptance or rejection – myths and influencing factors
Much time goes into conducting good research, writing a manuscript and finding a suitable journal in which to publish the results. Then there’s the wait. Addressing the myths about writing and publication delays, as well as the factors that delay publication, can help authors get through this process better.
3 December 2024
“Are you cussing with me?!” The circumvention of swearwords in Fantastic Mr. Fox
Clearly, one can’t use the f-word in a film primarily made for kids. Circumventing swearwords, Wes Anderson’s wonderful 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!
5 November 2024
When it comes to language, like Neo, we really should take the red pill
The digital rain – the three-dimensional type that clicks over as it tumbles – is not just one of many images in The Matrix movies. It represents what holds this entire world together, what it runs on, on screen. ‘Seeing’ the code helps Neo. Over the years, there’s been much speculation about what the code’s origins are and what it represents to viewers. Further, what could it mean in relation to language?
3 October 2024
What the heck does yeet mean?
Institutions such as Merriam-Webster don’t simply yeet a new word into the dictionary when they first encounter it. They wait for “sustained, meaningful, widespread use”. Yeet is a juicy, expressive slang word. It can function as a verb, noun or exclamation, and it’s sometimes accompanied by a dance move. It expresses excitement, enthusiasm, victory or surprise…
3 September 2024
Some great familects from two films and a TV series
A familect or familylect is a distinct lexicon that some families or groups come up with – expressive, playful words for persons, pets, things and imaginary things. For your edification, I’ve chosen dialogue from two films and a TV series for their over-the-top eloquence and poetic slang…
1 August 2024
“It’s on the tip of my tongue…”
You look for a word. You’re about to say it. Then, poof, it’s gone. You just cannot remember it. So, what’s going on? The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) moment phenomenon is an umbrella term for both the forgetting of a word or name and the trace of it in our memory…
4 July 2024
So, 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’s so ubiquitous that it’s surprising how recent it is. Hello was popularised by the adoption of the telephone, which “overnight cut right through the 19th-century etiquette that you don’t speak to anyone unless you’ve been introduced”.
30 May 2024
Semantic superheroes are taking to the streets
Often under cover of night, volunteers are criss-crossing city streets. They’re not revolutionaries, nor are they doing anything dodgy. They’re radical copyeditors, and they correct the syntactical shortcomings of poets in training and unrequited lovers. Why? Because grammatical errors cause stress…
30 April 2024
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 what Jonathon Owen calls its “distractingly idiosyncratic” house style. “Nöw yöu knöw”.
28 March 2024
A 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.
5 March 2024
Gosh, 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.
6 February 2024
Gertrude 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.
9 January 2024
What are your favourite words of the year 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…
30 November 2023
Steven 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”.
31 October 2023
Sitzfleisch, the antidote to procrastination
German has some beautiful words. Besides schadenfreude, wanderlust, doppelgänger, weltanschauung, schmetterling and scheiße, arguably its most useful word is sitzfleisch. In short, sitzfleisch (assflesh, assmeat) demands that we take the decision to not half-ass our way through any task.
3 October 2023
Abstracts 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 and incomplete.
31 August 2023
So, what are hyperpolyglots and what can we learn from them?
Did you know that fewer than 1,000 people in the world speak 11 or more languages? Those who have studied hyperpolyglots reveal what these rare, accomplished individuals can teach us about learning a language.
1 August 2023
Language is not conservative
Every language changes over time – even the international auxiliary language (IAL) Esperanto. This is exemplified in the title of Prof. John McWhorter’s book, Words on the move: Why English won’t – and can’t sit still (like, literally). Yet many people take conservative views on languages. But languages are not conservative.
3 July 2023
“Who farted?” The passive voice and grammatical and scientific inexactness
The active voice emphasises agency. In some – rare – cases, the passive is fitting. Unfortunately, many writers don’t know when to use it, and therefore use it unnecessarily and/or badly. Further, not all sentences can be passivised. Further, to write “It is concluded that this method is effective” is hedging – a transparent attempt to evade the risk of commitment by leaving open a way of retreating. Why else would a writer or researcher diminish their findings, contributions or opinions?
1 June 2023
On clauses and subordinating conjunctions
Independent clauses are complete sentences by themselves; they don’t depend on any other construction to form a sentence: Charlie runs. Charlie eats a shoe. As Bushnell notes, like Charlie Chaplin when he’s avoiding trouble, they can stand up by themselves. Subordinating conjunctions (I provide examples) are extremely useful words! They link a dependent clause to an independent one.
2 May 2023
How is it that Danielle Steel has written more than 190 books?
She has published more than 190 books – most of these on ‘Ollie’, her beloved 1946 Olympia typewriter. A sign in her office reads, “There are no miracles. There is only discipline”. Steel ascribes her productivity to boundless energy and her drive to push through feelings of stuckness, forging ahead rather than shying away from the material at hand. She has a real love of writing and a clear purpose. “I mean, I want to go on forever, just writing”.
3 April 2023
The wonderful neologisms known as familect phrases
A familect is a distinct lexicon developed by some families or groups: expressive phrases for persons, pets, things and imaginary things, usually mixed in with inside jokes, deliberately mispronounced words, shorthands, language play, metaphor, imagery, absurdity and sometimes movement. They’re fun! And they can build community.
1 March 2023
Should the word data be plural or singular?
In academic and scientific work, for good reason, the word data appears often. Yet there are differing views among copyeditors and style guides about data plural vs. singular. Data as singular is not unanimously accepted even in non-scientific English. Fortunately, this matter is swiftly settled. Data = a count noun, not a mass noun.
1 February 2023
Did you know that there are only nine primary parts of speech in English?
In English, words are organised and classified in an interesting and extremely useful way – according to their function; these functions are parts of speech. There are only nine: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners and interjections. It really is that simple.
17 January 2023
On setting time and word count goals in our writing assignments
Writing is hard. As Hawthorne noted, “Easy reading is damn hard writing”. And building momentum on a writing assignment can be challenging alongside work/teaching, family and rest. The research is what makes academic writing so time-consuming. Everything is possible, especially on a deadline, for better or for worse, depending on how we go about it.
1 December 2022
The most widely recognised word in the world is... OK
OK and its variants are survivors of a playful tendency for initialisations (a form of abbreviation) of common phrases with deliberate, jocular, onomatopoeic misspellings. Much like LOL, OMG, BRB or AF these days, this craze swept 19th century America following its first known use in print in 1839. For fun, educated persons deliberately misspelled and initialised words and phrases.
1 November 2022
Whassup, dog?! The joys and creativity of informal words
Both classic and plain English differ vastly from what we hear on the streets, television, the movies, songs, adverts, digital media, social media, memes and so on. Informal words and phrases can be deliciously expressive. And their meanings change over time – what’s hip, cool, lit, sweet, sick, epic, dank or the bomb today may be less so tomorrow.
30 September 2022
Can you pronounce – and spell – every single word in English? Jacques Bailly can
28 August 2022
So, what are the two most important styles in English?
Speaking or writing is always done in a style. The two most important ones are the classic style and the plain style. They differ from spoken English, the oratory style, the bureaucratic style, the reflexive style, the contemplative style, the explanatory style, the apologetic style, the romantic style, the prophetic style, the informal style, slang and swearwords, as well as the bluffing style (a.k.a. waffle or BS).
1 August 2022
So, how many errors are acceptable in a text?
Are errors acceptable in a manuscript and, if yes, how many? Some say that a text that was hastily proofread by one proofreader may have one typo per 1,000 words; others say three per 10,000 words. To some, one error per page is a very high ratio. One reason to keep the number of known errors as low as possible is that we cannot count unknown errors. The best case is as few as possible, preferably none.
30 June 2022
So, what exactly is (text) editing?
To edit is to unlock a text’s full potential and make its writing shine. A great edit has a profound, exponential effect on the quality of a manuscript and the experience of its readers. Editing renders writing ready to go out into the world. While almost every text needs editing, the next question is: which type(s) does it need? It may need only some of these: developmental editing, evaluation editing, content editing, line editing, copyediting and/or proofreading.
1 June 2022
Why the heck do we curse? ‘Strong’ language and its benefits
Views on swearing vary widely. Some consider it a mean, low vice of the foolish and wicked. On the other hand, there’s Mel Brooks: “I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.” Whatever one’s views on swearwords, obscenities and taboos, they contain much information about the culture that has shaped a language. Further, humans are not the only primates who curse.