Given the amount of change that some of our dearest and commonest words have gone through, there is absolutely no reason to say that a new meaning is wrong simply because it is not the original. And if you do insist on saying that it is, you should kn…
If you think language mavens are bad, try etiquette mavens.
Summary: Pick your battles against ambiguity. Where ambiguity is truly detrimental, put forth the effort to clarify, to root out plausible ambiguities and remove them. Where ambiguity is tolerable, it can be better to leave it in to keep from exhaust…
I think I might annoy some people with this blogpost, so to get myself psyched up for it – I’ve imagined that I’m being interviewed by the BBC’s arch-interrogator, Jeremy Paxman.
Jeremy Paxman interviews Michael Howard. “Did you t…
If there was a support group called CBWA (Course Book Writers Anonymous), I would stand up and introduce myself as follows:
“My name is Ken Wilson and I’m a course book writer. I’m a native speaker, I was a full-time English teacher for about t…
Summary: Momentarily can mean either “for a moment” or “in a moment”. Both meanings are over 140 years old, and both date back to before the word momentarily was common. Allowing for both meanings doesn’t introduce …
I was facilitating a workshop with a project team and realised that something was wrong!
Symptom: the 5 people in the project team were talking differently about the project
Analysis: I gave each person a piece of flip chart paper and asked them to wri…
Does it matter how you pronounce 2010?
My stand-out memories of the early Noughties …
2000 – My first trip to China
As the Noughties dawned, I was in the middle of a stream of author visits, which had reached a peak about two years before and was showing no sign of slowing down….
There’s no need to fear hopefully. Sentential adverbs are a part of life, and so are words with shifted meanings.