Sulphur or sulfur? has proved to be such a runaway success that I have declared it hors de concours.
A recent post about a translation problem that I had concerning clients who think they know best has proved remarkably popular with alphabetical order following it. My discussion of the gender of ships (should a ship be referred to with feminine pronouns?) has been attracting readers. Number four is one of the series of screenshots from my books, in this case the article about the word folk from A Guide to English Language Usage. Commas and relative clauses come next with a strange example from the Guardian newspaper and apostrophes are an eternal bugbear for pedants. My view is clear: ‘Apostrophes in English are a menace and should be abolished.’ Harp Marx was no doubt a good, true and loyal man so my post entitled Harpo Marx a false friend looks at the falsity of friends from the language point of view. Is the word people singular or plural? It can be either and I look at this odd phenomenon in the context of Sunday’s election in Catalonia. Derby and the rest, which discusses the pronunciation of that name and others in British English, is the only member of this list to have survived from last time while coming in at number ten we have a pernicketiness of pedants – surely the correct word for them.
Not surprisingly, the Top Ten tend to be recent posts so I will go to the bottom of the pile to find some older ones that are still well worth looking at. First off, there is my apology to the Dhivehi language; to find out what I am apologising for please follow the link in the post. Of that ilk is one of those expressions that has gained a new life meaning something different from what it meant originally. Confusion in Oxford dictionaries? Well … I am a Cambridge man myself … Seriously though, Oxford dictionaries are one of the joys of the English language but sometimes things can be a little odd – as with any undertaking on that scale. Checking things is always a good thing for a translator to do and a comma catastrophe can wreck even the most important advertising material. The Word of the Year for 2009 was bailout and it came with some fascinating others. Brits and languages don’t usually mix easily, but language learning is not as good in Spain as it could be and one Spanish MEP discovered the problems with learning English. Problems with numbers have a language aspect and homophones are lying in wait for the unwary. That’s ten but I can’t resist mentioning the post about zero taller ants and other eggcorns.
(Zero taller ants!)
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