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Phrases from 2012 are so ‘last year’
The English language is always evolving and as some words fall out of favour others come into fashion. Indeed there are some that can even indicate a person’s age. Click on the image below to see some...
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10 items or less?
Back in 2008 Tesco bowed to pressure and changed the signage saying ’10 items or less’ to ‘Up to 10 items’. Why? Because it was wrong. Fewer and less are words that people frequently use incorrectly,...
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Earworms in the Man Cave
Thankfully, this is not a euphemism, but in fact two of the buzz words of 2012. It links back to a recent post about trendy phrases from 2012. Those phrases seemed largely to be Americanisms and these...
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The origins of disco
That is disco the word, rather than disco the music genre that spawned a whole new generation of rhythmically challenged dancers. The Oxford English Dictionary wants to use the power of crowdsourcing...
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‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’
How good is your spelling in your own language or English? Does it matter if you can or can’t spell? Have your tried this quiz? What about this one? What was your score? There is a strong argument that...
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Cognates that don’t stagnate
15,000 years ago there were worms. Not only were there worms, but we were calling them worms. Researchers at Reading University have uncovered 23 such words. These words are ‘ultraconserved’ meaning...
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Do you ever get the urge to gigil?
There are some amazingly useful words in other languages that we just don’t have in English (the Filipino word ‘gigil’ being one of them). The great thing about English though is its capacity to take...
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A cornucopia of collectives
What do you call a group of sheep? Is it a flock or a herd? What about a group of lions or perhaps a number of wolves? We have some wonderful collective nouns & test your English by trying this...
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Animal adjectives
Describing someone as having feline grace would generally be thought of as a positive comment. Feline is an adjective meaning related to or characteristic of a cat. Therefore, we are saying that person...
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What do the words ‘chav’, ‘omnishambles’ and ‘selfie’ have in common?
……yes, that’s right. They’ve all been named ‘word of the year’ by Oxford Dictionaries at some point in time - ‘selfie’ or self-portrait photograph being awarded the accolade this year. Though the term...
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