Separated by a Common Language

I'm just back from a FABULOUS time at the Dictionary Society of North America conference. Fabulous not just because it was hosted by the University of the West Indies in Barbados (wheeeeee!), but because dictionary people are just the best people. No offen{c/s}e academic linguists, cognitive scientists,...

And so we come to the end of Book Week. There may well be other books that I'd been sent at some point or another, and if I find them, I may stick in a book post here or there. But I'm ending with a book that I cannot wait to read, but that I have to wait to read because of other work-related reading...

I missed a couple of my promised 'post a day for Book Week' posts because I was running a fantabulous event (if I do say so myself) called Doing Public Linguistics. The event was about linguists doing things like I do here with the blog—engaging non-academics in the work we do as academic linguists....

Emma, an English friend now living in Canada, asked me: Have you ever looked at measuring tape/tape measure for UK/US? A Canadian friend said she uses the first for the bendy fabric kind and the second for the more rigid, retractable builders' kind. And I said 'That's how I do it too. What do...

I've written a new blog post, but it's not here. So if you're interested in thinking about whether dictionaries (and the written word in general) play different roles in the US and UK, then follow this link to OxfordWords, the Oxford dictionaries blog. Also, as long as I'm here, I've got another...

This post is getting so out-of-hand long that I'm going to put in section headings. You can take the academic to the blog, but you can't make her brief. pronouncing shone I had an interesting Difference of the Day (what I do on Twitter) request, regarding the pronunciation of shone, the past tense...