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An interesting linguistic debate has been raging over the drafting of the UK government’s “Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances” (MOMA) bill, which is being rushed through parliament because attorney general Suella Braverman is currently pregnant and her party want the new maternity provisions in place before she gives birth (in…

Mishearings are a common source of amusement to anyone with young children. We have friends who still refer to “school insect days” rather than INSET (in-service training) days, and who eagerly go “trickle treating” rather than trick-or-treating. This kind of idiosyncratic substitution is referred to as an “eggcorn”, which is…

Translation is not often top of the news agenda but that is exactly what happened over the Dutch translator selected to work on Amanda Gorman’s first collection of poems, including “The Hill we climb”, which she read at US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Dutch publisher Meulenhoff approached author Marieke…

I cannot profess to paying much attention to the New Year Honours list, but anything relating to language is always likely to catch my eye. The 2021 awards included a CBE for services to educational research for Professor Usha Goswami, Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the…

German is renowned for having a word for everything. Even non-German speakers know how brilliant the German compound noun system is if you need to create the right term for a very specific situation. German has been described as the Lego of languages, expertly assembling smaller components to create something…

If the current state of the world is tempting you into expletive-laden outbursts, fear not, apparently this is entirely healthy. In her fascinating book “Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language”, Emma Byrne explores how swearing can be an effective stress management mechanism. “[Swearing] has been…

As Covid-19 vaccine programmes pick up speed across the world, a key challenge is ensuring that sufficiently large numbers accept the offer of a vaccine and that false information is corrected. In the UK there is evidence that vaccine take-up is particularly low among people from black, Asian and minority…

English is a linguistic melting pot: much of our vocabulary is derived from Latin, sometimes via French, but other influences include Celtic, Greek, Norman, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Indian languages, German, Old Norse, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic. When borrowing lexical items from other languages, one of the questions writers face is…

Recently this blog discussed language extinction and its impact on cultural diversity. This post highlights a beautiful children’s book that tackles a similar theme, but with a focus on the loss of vocabulary used to describe our relationship with the natural world. Once again, we look at the link between…

Twitter is a great distraction and a veritable timewaster, but every so often it leads you to an undiscovered gem that makes all those lost hours seem worthwhile. So it was that I stumbled across this lovely, tweeted quotation about language from Wade Davis: "A language is not just a…