Blog

Linguistic false friends are words that appear similar in two different languages but have unrelated meanings. A common example is embarazada in Spanish, which looks like embarrassed but actually means pregnant. Most of the examples of German false friends in this week’s blog do not go quite as wildly astray…

Linguistic reappropriation (also referred to as reclamation or resignification) is the process by which a word intended as a pejorative is reclaimed and redefined by the group at which the disparaging term was originally directed. There are numerous historical examples: from the Impressionists, whose name is adopted from a critical…

As any parent will attest, trying to go places with small children in tow can be a challenge. Attempting to persuade them up and down Welsh hills in inclement weather for no apparent purpose other than to enjoy the scenery and you can soon have a mutiny on your hands.…

This blog recently delved into Polari, a form of slang used as a kind of secret language by people working in theatres, fairgrounds and markets and subsequently adopted by some gay people in the early to mid-20th century. This kind of jargon associated with a particular group is sometimes referred…

The quality of machine translation output is undoubtedly improving, and translators may be prompted to question their future with increasing volumes of post editing machine translation (PEMT) tasks among their offers of work. But a quick immersion in the world of PEMT is usually enough to reassure you that humans…

Polari is a form of slang associated with gay subculture, brought to mainstream attention in the UK by Kenneth Williams in Round the Horn, a radio show that had regular audiences of 15 million at its peak in the mid to late 1960s. Williams played one half of “Julian and…

Over the last few months, several news stories about language in the UK have caught my eye and prompted me to wonder if there is a renewed interest in some of the country’s older linguistic heritage, particularly around the geographical margins. In Alderney, the northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands,…

Novelists are well aware of the peril of giving two characters names that start with the same letter because readers have a tendency to get them confused. I sometimes struggle to keep track of who’s who in a book even when the name of both characters is not remotely similar,…

The Saturday Live show on BBC Radio 4 features a slot called “Inheritance Tracks”, in which a guest shares a piece of music they would like to recommend to future generations and a piece they have themselves inherited from a previous generation. I think this format would work well for…

During a bleary-eyed start to the day recently, discussion at the breakfast table turned to the pros and cons of different alarm clock devices and the tricks people deploy to ensure they get out of bed rather than remaining under the duvet. This led us on to the now lost…