English, Jack

I asked Mark Liberman to have a look at what I wrote yesterday since I was struggling to get my head around the probabilities. He was kind...

Well, not in the same day, but certainly within a 24-hour period. As I was lying in bed last night, reading Charles Mann's 1493 , I came...

This morning, I was reading this article at New Statesman, when I came across the following: Yet surely, when night after night atrociti...

The OED gives: b. Gram. determinative adjective, determinative pronoun, etc. (see quots.); determinative compound = tatpurusha n. ...

Over at the NYT, Alexander Nazaryan has a rather strident article about " The fallacy of balanced literacy ." Therein, he writes, ...

I listen to the Freakonomics Radio podcast from time to time, and back in May they aired an episode called " the three hardest words .....

As I mentioned, Schwa Fire is now out, and I've been quite enjoying it. Arika Okrent (whose name I have inexplicably misread for years ...

Back in November, 2013, there was a proposal on Kickstarter for a new language magazine. I chipped in to sponsor it and ended up on the edit...

1982 gave us the acronym AIDS formed from acquired immune deficiency syndrome. This is pronounced /eɪdz/. The fact that the final S is pro...

Part I I've been trying to understand categories better, and one of the books I've been reading in pursuit of this goal is George L...

The verb look  has been used to talk about the future for a long time. Perhaps the most common use is in the expression look forward to (som...

The word disseminate is a familiar one. It appears hundreds of times on my hard drive and in well over 20 email messages I've read or wr...

The summer issue is now available here . Check it out.

The newest issue of TESL Ontario's Contact  magazine is now available . This is the research symposium issue, based on talks given each ...

A student wrote to me asking about the meaning and placement of then  in this sentence. The product is then designed with this target pric...

I'm now into my second year as editor of TESL Ontario's  Contact  magazine . You can download issues for free as far back as 2000. I...

Last year, I blogged about the first English Proficiency Index here . Education First has now released their second index , and they're ...

Another new and potentially useful site: Extensive Reading Central is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing an Extensi...

Tutela has been in beta for about a year but had its official launch during the TESL Canada conference. From their terms of use: Tutela.ca...

As I wrote yesterday , there are some strange tagging decisions concerning determinatives in this corpus. It seems though, as I added in an...