To paraphrase Blackadder, as I am given to doing, “Bad grammar and spelling stalk the internet like two giant stalking things”. Today’s post will address a few more common errors found around the goldmine of misspelled invective that is the internet. Again, I will stress that is not an excuse to poke fun at people [...]
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Maybe if you’ve been living in a cave, or as a goatherd in deepest Kazakhstan you won’t have heard of Google. Not an unusual word these days, but an interesting story. Google is now a verb as well as a trade name – it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary this year – to [...] .flickr-photo { } .flickr-frame { float: left; text-align: center; margin-right: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } [...] Patois, pronounced pat-waa or sometimes pat-waa-z, is generally held to mean any language that is non-standard. The best bet seems to be that it originated from the Old French Patoier, meaning “to handle clumsily”. In English, a patois could be a regional dialect or a form of Pidgin English, such as the English spoken in [...] Pronounced flan-dge and a very amusing word to say. A flange is a lip or a rim attached or moulded into something to give stability or to provide a surface to which to attach something. When you look at a train’s wheels, the lip at the back of the wheel that stops the train falling [...] An interesting and contetious word. Representing the eighth letter of the English alphabet and pronounced ay-ch, there is much debate as to how it should be correctly pronounced. As it comes via Old French (roughly: aish), I can see no reason why anyone should pronounce it h-ay-ch. Many people still persist in pronouncing it with [...] A malapropism (mal-a-prop-izm) is a phrase in which one or more of the words is substituted with another, rendering the phrase or sentence completely nonsensical. The origin of the word is from Richard Sheridan’s Restoration comedy The Rivals, in which one of the characters, Mrs Malaprop, makes such mistakes on a regular basis. Her name [...] Now, you may think you know what this means but you could be wrong. A real-life example: I dropped into my local hostelry last evening for a restorative brew and got chatting. One thing led to another, I drank a large quantity of beer and completetly failed to post my Word du Jour. I awoke [...] |
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