By Ben Yagoda. A couple of years ago, the BBC published an essay on that staple of British journalism, the terribleness of Americanisms polluting the mother tongue. The Beeb invited readers to send in their own pet peeves and got such a response that it published a list of the 50 that were sent in most often. More...
By Allan Metcalf. For 2014 there seems to be no leading candidate for Word (or Phrase) of the Year, as I said last week. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of candidates. Just last week, for example, the news from Washington was generously sprinkled with enhanced interrogation techniques, the disputed CIA practice for obtaining information, and cromnibus, the disputed Congressional practice for obtaining government funding. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. As I promised last week, let me briefly discuss a further noteworthy fact about an interesting 1914 paper by George O. Curme. When I first saw the paper I thought there was a PDF encoding bug, or my eyes were playing tricks, but not so. It turns out that Curme was a radical reformer in one respect: He published his paper using an extensively revised spelling system. More...
By Laura Zhou. Limited courses, strict visa policy among other reasons foreigners aren't doing degrees in China. China's ambitions to attract more overseas students have been hampered by its lecturers' poor English proficiency and a lack of international courses, mainland education experts say.
"As a non-English-speaking country without enough English-language courses, foreign students need to take a language course before starting their studies in China," stated the Report of Chinese Students Studying Abroad, released by Beijing-based think tank, the Centre for China and Globalisation. More...
Les Français sont à la traîne en langues… Le constat n’est pas nouveau, et il se vérifie année après année. Publiée en novembre, la dernière enquête d’Education First a encore placé la France parmi les bonnets d’âne de l’Europe pour la maîtrise de l’anglais, et 29e sur un total de 63 pays étudiés. Pourtant, la demande des entreprises en matière de formation est bien présente. Voir l'article...
Créés il y a plus d’une trentaine d’années, les tests TOEIC sont aujourd’hui utilisée par plus de 14 000 entreprises, organismes gouvernementaux et autres programmes d’apprentissage dans 150 pays. Christine Confais-Morieux, est responsable marketing France et Europe de l’Ouest d’ETS Global, division d’ETS qui a créé et qui commercialise aujourd’hui un grand nombre de tests TOEIC. Voir l'article...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. There Is No Best Programming Language
Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teacher, 2014/12/12
There is no best programming language, writes Alfred Thompson. But of course there is: it's Perl! Just kidding. Actually, this post should serve as a cautionary note to those who believe there is an idea path or certain foundational core materials in education. There are no such things. More...
By Allan Metcalf. So on a rainy Monday in D.C. last month, at the Pavilion Café in the sculpture garden on the National Mall, I was lunching with Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. That’s the committee that oversees the society’s annual choice of Word of the Year. And we agreed 2014 hasn’t been the greatest year for a WOTY (as we familiarly call it). More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. A century ago this year, just before the First World War began, the grammarian George O. Curme published a short but remarkable paper entitled “Origin and Force of the Split Infinitive” (Modern Language Notes 29 (2), 41–45). It has deep roots in the 19th-century tradition of critical analysis of English grammar. And it is sobering to compare his paper’s meaty content with the thin gruel that passes for discussion of English grammar today. More...
By William Germano. Recently I was at a dinner party where people were using the words awful and awesome, possibly as antonyms. Awful was, I thought, used to describe something very bad, awesome something very good. The words awesome and awful have been doing do-si-do with one another for a while. So are they the same word? And if so, what word is that, exactly?
The Oxford English Dictionary records awful as medieval. Since the ninth century, it’sbeen the high-toned term of choice meaning “awe-inspiring,” in the sense of “causing dread; terrible, dreadful, appalling.” But awful is also “worthy of, or commanding, profound respect or fear,” and has been in that sense for almost as long.
Awful seems to sustain a body blow at the beginning of the 19th century, when it takes on the meaning “frightful, very ugly, monstrous; and hence as a mere intensive deriving its sense from the context = Exceedingly bad, great, long, etc.” A mere intensive? Say it isn’t so. More...
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