English, Jack

Responding to my letter to the Orangeville Banner about abhor , Don Hayward writes , Dear Editor, The English language is a twisted thi...

My aunt, who I greatly respect and whose company I very much enjoy, and I were hashing out the consequences of Geoff Pullum's latest Lan...

Over on the ETJ list, Nick M. says that his student was marked wrong for answering "Yes, I have many teachers," to the question, ...

Over on the ETJ list, a member writes , in part, I was brought up in a midwest family where "a lot" meant a piece of ground, and n...

Over on the TESL-L mailing list, Mert Bland, Dean of Graduate Studies at CBU (That's Central Buganda University, not Christian Brothers ...

I was somewhat taken aback recently when a disucssion on the ETJ mailing list brought to light the different interpretations of the 's ...

The linguist Bill Bright, has passed away . While I was reading through some of his talks, I came across the following story about Edward Sa...

I will admit to regularly and vainly checking my blog hit count. Part of the report tells me how you got here. Many users find their way ov...

The Toronto Star has been running a series of promotions with the tag line, "ask why". Unfortunately, their misuse of numbers mig...

One of my students submitted a rough draft recently with the sentence, "While coffee makers take large profits, coffee farmers must liv...

And speaking of extensive reading , our department has recently been given a bit of money to expand our catalogue of graded readers, so I as...

On the Extensive Reading mailing list , Dave Kees floated the idea today that China (or likely any developing country) could use extensive r...

In browsing through the journals of the Royal Society, dating from 1665 and now available to all and sundry for FREE online, I came across a...

In a happy coincidence, I randomly opened Garner's usage (which I borrowed from the library to follow up on the existential question of...

Last Thursday, novelist, fashion writer, and host of CBC Radio's summer language show, "And Sometimes Y ", Russell Smith began...

In my gobsmacked amazement at the inaccuracy of the claim that "there is no woken up ", it seems that I have misconstrued June Ca...

June Casagrande, is author of, Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies , has started writing and a column in the Burbank Leader. In the most r...

Jan Freeman has a good article explaining that adverbs (e.g. "Think different ") aren't turning into adjectives as a result ...

This year, along with their traditional posting of the ergonomic keyboard for pirates, Language Log is celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day w...

Endel Tulving is featured in an article by Barbara Turnbull in today's Toronto Star. He's a memory reasercher whose studies have h...