Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Trouble with Harry (1955), amidst all its talk of murder and romance, has a fun little exchange of sociolinguistic interest between John Forsythe (‘Sam Marlowe’) and Edmund Gwenn (‘Capt. Albert Wiles’):
The Trouble with Harry’s grammar
August 21, 2020
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dialect, film, grammar, humour, language, linguistics, usage | Tagged: Abby Kaplan, acting, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Korzybski, dialect, Edmund Gwenn, ethnolinguistics, film, General Semantics, grammar, humour, language, language acquisition, linguistics, prescriptivism, sociolinguistics, The Birds, The Trouble with Harry, Tippi Hedren, usage, whilst | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
Whilst, amongst, amidst — old-fashioned or normal?
November 28, 2012Language peeves can develop when a word or phrase becomes, or seems to become, rapidly popular – ongoing, for example. You begin to notice it everywhere, and you say Enough! And then there are usages people dislike for the opposite reason: they’re no longer popular enough. They have become … old-fashioned.
36 Comments | dialect, language, usage, words, writing | Tagged: American English, amongst, British English, dialects, language, linguistics, peevology, semantics, Storify, Twitter, usage, whilst, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 