June 1, 2022
This Reuters story about monkeypox, published on 30 May 2022, has an unfortunate ambiguity in its headline:

The same headline appeared on sites syndicating the report, like Yahoo! News and Nasdaq, and with trivial differences at the US’s ABC News, India’s Business Standard, Singapore’s Straits Times, and others.
The problem is the main clause:
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editing, grammar, journalism, language, news, syntax | Tagged: ambiguity, crash blossoms, editing, garden path sentences, grammar, headlines, headlinese, journalism, language, monkeypox, news, Reuters, semantics, syntax, that |
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Posted by Stan Carey
March 25, 2022
On a recent rewatch of the 1979 film The Warriors, I noticed an unusual pronoun spoken by Cleon, played by Dorsey Wright:*

Ourself, once in regular use, is now scarce outside of certain dialects, and many (maybe most) people would question its validity. I’ve seen it followed by a cautious editorial [sic] even in linguistic contexts. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), describing it as the reflexive form of singular we – ‘an honorific pronoun used by monarchs, popes, and the like’ – says it is ‘hardly current’ in present-day English.
But that’s not the whole story, and it belies the word’s surprising versatility and stubborn survival outside of mainstream Englishes, which this post will outline. There are graphs and data further down, but let’s start with usage.
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dialect, grammar, language, language history, lexicography, linguistics, usage, words, writing | Tagged: corpus linguistics, descriptivism, dialect, grammar, langauge history, language, language change, lexicography, linguistics, ourself, personal pronouns, politics of language, pronouns, standardized English, usage, words, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey
May 13, 2021
A selection of language-themed links for your listening, viewing, and (mostly) reading pleasure.
How to say chorizo.
History of the asterisk.
Emoji time 🕙 is meaningless.
Bookselling in the End Times.
Neopronouns: a beginner’s guide.
New Covid-inspired German words.
The linguistic construction of terrorists.
Boyo-wulf: Beowulf translated into Cork slang.
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books, editing, language, language history, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: books, dictionaries, etymology, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, usage, words |
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 15, 2020
Last month I mentioned my new essay on Irish English dialect, ‘Wasn’t It Herself Told Me?’, commissioned for the winter 2020 edition of the literary magazine The Stinging Fly.
If you didn’t get a copy of the Stinging Fly and want to read more of this material, you can now do so at the Irish Times website, which has published an abridged version of the essay. (I did the abridging myself, but some of the italics got lost in transit.)
Because the new Stinging Fly is a Galway special, the essay looks in particular at the Galway dialect, though this does not differ hugely from Irish English more broadly. The excerpt below elaborates on that point, using geography as an analogy:
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dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, linguistics, personal, writing | Tagged: after perfect, dialect, Eilís Dillon, Galway, Galway 2020, geography, grammar, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish English, Irish Times, Irish writing, language, linguistics, personal, Stinging Fly, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey
October 6, 2020
I have three new posts up at my column for Macmillan Dictionary Blog:
Grubbing around for etymology digs into the origins and development of grub:
The noun grub has two common senses, but the connection between them is not widely known. It’s used informally to mean ‘food’, and it can also refer to ‘a young insect without wings or legs, like a small worm’ – in other words, a larva. The two grubs are related, etymologically, but not in the way you may be imagining – depending on your diet.
Piqued by peek and peak sorts out these often-confused homophones, offering mnemonics for each:
To peak (v.) means to reach the highest amount, level, or standard. Phrases that use peak include off-peak, peak oil, and peak time. This meaning explains why people sometimes write the eggcorn peak one’s interest instead of pique one’s interest – they may picture that interest peaking. To remember when to use the spelling peak, think of how the capital letter A is like a mountain. Picture the spelling as peAk, if that helps.
Policing grammar on the radio looks at an example of usage-peeving, wherein a journalist who spoke on Irish radio was criticised by one listener for her grammar:
According to Muphry’s Law (yes, that’s how it’s spelt), any complaint about grammar or usage will itself contain an error. Sure enough, the pedant misspells Moore’s name, and his punctuation is a mess. More importantly, he fails to understand that the rules of formal written English are not universal. Different norms apply when you’re having a conversation, for example, and speaking in your own dialect. So those ‘rules’ don’t even apply in most situations.

Grubbing around in the sand in County Mayo,
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dialect, etymology, grammar, language, spelling, usage, words, writing | Tagged: dialect, etymology, grammar, grub, homophones, language, Macmillan Dictionary Blog, mnemonic, peak, peek, peeving, pique, prescriptivism, spelling, usage, words, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey
September 16, 2020
This headline appeared on the front page of the Guardian website last weekend and came to my attention via Mercedes Durham on Twitter:
Vaccine trials halted after patient fell ill restart

It’s quite the syntactic rug-pull. Everything seems fine and straightforward until that last word, restart, which turns out to be the predicate, forcing the reader to re-evaluate what they’ve just read. The sense is so obscured that it may take a few attempts.
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editing, grammar, journalism, language, syntax | Tagged: ambiguity, crash blossoms, editing, garden path sentences, grammar, Guardian, headlines, journalism, language, newspapers, reading, relative clauses, syntax, that |
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Posted by Stan Carey
September 10, 2020
In V. S. Naipaul’s novel Half a Life, a boy is waging a battle, mostly silent, with his father, through stories he writes and leaves lying around strategically at home. One day the boy, Willie, is home from school for lunch and sees his exercise book still untouched.
Willie thought in his head, in English, “He is not only a fraud, but a coward.” The sentence didn’t sound right; there was a break in the logic somewhere. So he did it over. “Not only is he a fraud, but he is also a coward.” The inversion in the beginning of the sentence worried him, and the “but” seemed odd, and the “also.” And then, on the way back to the Canadian mission school, the grammatical fussiness of his composition class took over. He tried out other versions of the sentence in his head, and he found when he got to the school that he had forgotten his father and the occasion.
This passage, even apart from cultural, familial, and psychological complications, is interesting from the point of view of grammar and style. I’m curious about what ‘didn’t sound right’ to Willie in the first formulation of the line. What ‘break in the logic’ does he feel?
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books, grammar, language, literature, phrases, syntax, writing | Tagged: books, grammar, Half a Life, idioms, language, literature, not only but also, phrases, reading, syntax, usage, V.S. Naipaul, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey