James McElvenny writes: The world of blogging – as I’m sure Fully (sic)’s readers have already noticed – consists largely of rants and counter-rants. A favourite counter-rant for a modern, scientific and progressive-minded blog like this one is to have a go at linguistic prescriptivists, those who work themselves up into a rage because other [...]
READ MORE3 Results
WORDS
Handys
James McElvenny writes: In my role as Fully (sic)’s (temporary) Europe correspondent, I’ve had the opportunity to observe some pretty strange uses of my native language, English, on the Continent. In most parts of the world today English has established itself as the default lingua franca, the language that people who don’t share a native [...]
READ MOREJourneys in new words
The Herald Sun writes about words that haven’t quite yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.
The folks at the OED keep a store of interesting words that might become words of wider use. They’re words that have become known to those OED staff who are always on the lookout for up-and-coming words that aren’t already listed in the dictionary’s archives. Some of them go straight to the printing floor – every year there is controversy as new words are listed. Cries of “Oh, come on, that’s not a word!” or “No one will be saying that in 10 years!” fly through the internet. It must be difficult to judge what makes it, and what doesn’t. Does Hanson’s earworm “mmm-bop” count? What about Homer Simpson’s now-widespread exclamation “D’oh!”?
READ MORE
