Monthly Archives: August 2013

The changing nature of the English language worldwide

Stefan Dollinger recently spoke about what the Oxford English Dictionary should do to account for the fact that English is now spoken by more non-native speakers world-wide than it is by native speakers: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Oxford+English+Dictionary+mulls+what+gets+what+stays/8781779/story.html

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Have you ever been marked down for “grammatical errors”? — A linguist responds

Anne Curzan, a linguist at the University of Michigan, talks about marking students off for “grammatical errors”: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/08/14/dinging-for-grammatical-errors/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en This blog entry is part of “Lingua Franca” of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog with a number of good entries.

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Should the word “literally” be abandoned?

The writer in The Guardian believes that the word literally should be set aside (at least for a while), not only because it is used in a sense directly opposed to its original meaning (i.e., meaning ‘figuratively’), but also because it … Continue reading

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