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I take up yoga on a regular basis and drop it again just as regularly in despair at my less than flexible limbs. There is only so much humiliation a person can take in an exercise class! Despite my inauspicious track record when it comes to sticking to a yoga…

Back in 2017, the Rosetta blog reported on problems with the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) used to assess healthcare workers’ English language abilities before being approved to work in the UK. Somewhat famously, an Australian nurse failed the IELTS, one of several cases to cast doubt on its…

As a former student of German at Cambridge University, the Times headline “Cambridge seizes Zeitgeist with gender-neutral German” immediately caught my eye. Despite the bold claim in the introductory paragraph that the university is saying “Auf Wiedersehen to teaching gendered German”, the reality is somewhat more mundane. Contrary to wild…

Translators are well used to wrangling complex text into comprehensible shape. If you do a good job and deal with a wide range of documents, you sometimes get the feeling that your translated text might be higher quality than the original source. The truth is that not all documents are…

False friends are a favourite topic for linguists and translators and something this blog has covered previously, describing them as lexical con artists. In this week’s blog, we immerse ourselves in the world of fashion, where false friends seem to be particularly abundant. Fashion vocabulary in German is sprinkled with…

The world changes and language races to keep up. Sometimes a word that had a very clear meaning becomes more ambiguous as a result of new inventions or discoveries. Enter the retronym, a type of neologism in which the new name helps distinguish between an existing form and a more…

Ambrose Bierce (1842 – ca 1914) was an American author and journalist, best known to language lovers as the creator of the Devil’s Dictionary, first published in 1911. The dictionary is a collection of irreverent and amusing definitions, which began life in Bierce’s various contributions to magazines and newspapers in…

A discussion of the specialised terminology and catchphrases used in different professions prompted my writer/director brother to give me a rundown of some of the jargon used in the film industry. I’ve picked my favourites to include here and am now trying to find ways to re-engineer some of these…

This blog previously delved into the question of foreign diacritics and whether or not to include them in English text. Mulling this issue again recently led me off down another rabbit hole to investigate linguistic purism in English. Some time ago, I came across the piece “Uncleftish Beholding” by American…

When we acquire language, we build up an internal store of semantic information that allows us to interpret the meaning of words when we encounter them again. Generally, this process is remarkably successful, but every so often it misfires, and a word is filed away in our brain with an…