We have just returned home after a lovely weekend at the #ClunesBookTown festival. This morning I bought a book called 'Desert Anzacs the under-told story'. I cannot attest to the worth of the book but I really like the humility in the title. It is not 'untold' as so many authors claim for whatever they are writing, but 'undertold'.
I suppose that nearly all authors think that their history is undertold - that is the reason they feel compelled to write the book. But it is rare that a history is truly untold and often the 'untold' history book provides a lot of evidence that refutes the claim such as parliamentary debates, letters etc.
My complaint also applies to claims of the 'first', the 'biggest', etc. We suffer from the over-use of superlatives which diminishes the impact of these significant words.
'Amazing' deserves a special mention. Next time you feel tempted to use this word, perhaps stop and think about whether it is truly amazing. If you are using the word every day, that indicates that you may be either experiencing a life that no-one else has ever lived or you are diminishing the meaning of the word.
It is really weird that there are no words for "the day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow" in English. So inefficient! #English#englishlanguage
Hiii, we're The Fox Collective, we just migrated to wetdry.world from strangeobject.space. We are #plural (DID system), #autistic and polyfragmented to hell and back :3
Collectively we go by Fox and it/fox pronouns but our main host Kit goes by it/star/he. We are #transmasc and #aromantic
You may have already seen that our special interests are #englishlanguage and #greekmythology specifically. We also enjoy art, psychology, accessibility in public spaces and online (because we don't see it being done well a lot), anarchy, positivity, cats, foxes, and reading.
We will always have talk about ableism, mental health, and physical health behind a content warning. We won't boost images that have bad or no alt text.
Our girlfriend is on Fedi too, she is @GnomedDev the cutest catgirl around
We block freely if you hold beliefs that are spreading misinformation, are directly bigoted, or if you evade filters. Oh also we are a minor, so "minors dni" just fuck off for a couple months
I'm reading a book about the history of spelling (Spell it Out) and it's more interesting than you'd think.
Did you know that arctic was originally pronounced "artic", but the pron changed after some wise guys added the 'c' to make it look more like its Latin source?
Also, that ghost gained its 'h' entirely because Flemish typesetters preferred the look of the Flemish word "gheest"?
And apparently honey was once spelled "huni", but that looked like a collection of incomprehensible short downward strokes in cursive script, so it was changed to something more visually distinctive.
Niche pre-Xmas request: are there any early modern English scholars out there? My son needs to find a (fairly small) corpus of EME text for his third-year project in computer science, to improve auto-parsing of text despite spelling variations in old English. Boosts welcome! #EarlyModernEnglish#ComputerScience#EnglishLanguage
Um, what kind of word is "togethering?" I just had that as a correction when I spell checked, and it's not even anything I added to any dictionaries. #EnglishLanguage
How linguists are unlocking the meanings of #Shakespeare 's words using numbers
"Today it would seem odd to describe a flower with the word "bastard"—why apply a term of personal abuse to a flower? But in Shakespeare's time, "bastard" was a technical term describing certain plants."
I can't remember where I grabbed this text from on the order of adjectives, but this feels like a good creative prompt for linguistic rule breakers and maybe even a way to have fun with the generative models.
But does "Great Green Gobs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts" break the rule? If gobs are material rather than shape I guess not. #englishLanguage
I have mixed feeling that "a part" means one of a whole and "apart" means separated. I feel like it should be reversed. #writing#englishisweird#englishlanguage like just why?