Bad Reporting of the Day: All Commas Will Die!

A professor of comparative English at Columbia university said that commas should be abolished. He said we should get rid of them and no one would care. He says we should kill them. Destroy them. Take each one and murder it in cold blood. And the reaction? Pages of internet […]


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Apostrophes Return to Cambridge

Earlier in the year we reported on how Cambridge city council in the UK had decided not to use apostrophes in street signs and how examiners for Cambridge Assessment (the ones who do all the TEFL exams) had supported this idea. It was, of course, ridiculous of them to do […]


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How Hard is it to Learn English?

How hard is it to learn English? Well that’s not easy for me to say since I’ve been learning it since the day I was born (actually, recent research suggests I’ve been learning it since I was in the womb1). But it got me thinking. I searched around a bit […]


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Grammer

Please… whatever else you do… spell GRAMMAR with an A at the end and not an E. GRAMM A R – yes GRAMM E R – no According to Google, a search for ‘grammer’ brings up over 4 million hits. Google results for GRAMMER However, things seem to be getting […]


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German Shitstorms are not Vulgar…

An interesting sideline to the eternal debate about taboo words‏‎. The BBC reports that the English term, shitstorm, considered by many to be vulgar and not a word to be used in public as such, has entered the German‏‎ vocabulary. However, it has entered as a perfectly acceptable term and, […]


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