Intralexy
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 02-10-2011
Some readers may be fed up with me for not blogging enough and seeming to spend all my time on Twitter. Those readers will probably not like this post, as it’s about what I’m doing on Twitter. But perhaps it might get you interested in joining the party there?
both the two of us
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 16-09-2011
10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses
Filed Under (Technology Language) by Admin on 13-09-2011
Over the summer I was running a number of two week ICT in language teaching courses for teachers from around the world. The courses were part of the Bell summer campus at Homerton College Cambridge. This was the first time in a while I had been asked to teach such long courses and i thought it was a great opportunity to see if I could fundamentally change the way the teachers related to technology, not just in the classroom as a tool for teaching learners, but as a tool within their everyday working practice.
shoes
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 10-09-2011
So, shoes. Hard to believe I’ve not blogged about them already! First slide, please:
spunk and spunky
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 17-08-2011
It’s our last full day in the US after a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation of nearly a month. I’d thought I’d catch up on blogging during this downtime, but I started to enjoy actually being on holiday/vacation. Imagine that!
nous, gumption, horse sense
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 04-08-2011
I probably unfairly privilege Ben Zimmer when he comes into my blog-suggestions inbox (which is to say, I’m about to cover a suggestion of his only 13 months after he suggested it). As a lexicographer, he knows what counts as an answerable question (so many that I’m sent are not), and, as a language columnist, he has a good sense of which topics might have a bit of (orig. AmE) mileage in them.
bits and pieces
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 30-07-2011
I’ll put the little bits before the big piece, just so they don’t get lost. Here are a couple of things I’ve meant to tell you about and another waste of space on a certain journalist’s take on Americanisms.
anti-Americanismism, part 2
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 28-07-2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO17B-ACRn0As promised, here’s my reaction to the second half of the BBC’s list of ‘Your most noted Americanisms’. Since part 1, many others have weighed in on that BBC piece, including Stan Carey, Not From Round Here, and on the BBC website (huzzah!!) Grant Barrett. The commenters at the BBC site, you may discern, are not completely taken with Grant’s message.
anti-Americanismism, part 1
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 21-07-2011
In my last post, I refrained from saying much about the BBC Magazine piece by Matthew Engel on ‘Why do some Americanisms annoy people?’, pointing readers instead to Mark Liberman/Language Log’s analysis of the so-called Americanisms that annoy at least Matthew Engel. Today the BBC website followed up with ‘50 of your noted Americanisms‘, and already Geoff Pullum/Language Log, Johnson, Americans Living in London–and others I’ve yet to hear about, I’m sure–have posted reasoned replies to this offensive piece.
milk teeth and baby teeth
Filed Under (Language A La Carte) by Admin on 17-07-2011
Mark Liberman at Language Log has saved you from the rant that this weekend’s post was to be. Oh, thank you, Mark! His post from earlier today does what needed to be done about journalist Matthew Engel’s BBC piece “Why do some Americanisms irritate people?” (Yes, people.) The Language Log post starts by pointing out that only one of the first five ‘Americanisms’ cited by Engel is, in fact, American in origin. The only fault I can find with Liberman’s piece is that it is not entitled “Why do BBC language features annoy linguists?”*
