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Descriptive Writing

Watch Comma Queen | Comma Queen: Possessed | The New Yorker Video | CNE. Steven Pinker’s Bad Grammar. In a prologue to “The Sense of Style,” subtitled “A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” the brain scientist Steven Pinker explains that he’s been reading style manuals of late, and that they bum him out. Strunk and White had “a tenuous grasp of grammar,” and George Orwell contradicted himself. Guides tend to fall back on “folklore and myth.” And for what purpose? Grammar busybodies and their “diktats” should be obsolete. “Today’s writers are infused by the spirit of scientific skepticism and the ethos of questioning authority,” Pinker writes. “We have a body of research on the mental dynamics of reading: the waxing and waning of memory load as readers comprehend a passage, the incrementing of their knowledge as they come to grasp its meaning, the blind alleys that can lead them astray.”

Some skimmings from the final part of Pinker’s book ran in the Guardian last month, under the provocative headline “10 ‘Grammar Rules’ It’s OK To Break (Sometimes).” The pedants' revolt: lament for a golden age of grammar that never existed | Mind your language. The great grammarian Otto Jespersen, writing in 1909, said English grammar was "not a set of stiff dogmatic precepts, according to which some things are correct and others absolutely wrong"; but was living and developing, "founded on the past" but preparing the way for the future, "something that is not always consistent or perfect, but progressing and perfectible – in one word, human".

Language has been changing since the Tower of Babel and will continue to do so. The most conservative of traditionalists admit this, and claim to accept it, though they are oddly shy about putting forward examples of change they are happy with. Just think for a moment about technological change and how it drives language.

Some of us can remember when spam was a sort of cheap ham they made into fritters for our school dinners. Happy days. A lot of people seem to think all change must be for the worse. This brings me to the descriptive v prescriptive argument. Does this mean that things are getting worse? What Prime Minister Gillard Said by Deborah Cameron. Julia Gillard by Deborah Cameron The Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard did not mince her words earlier this month when she said of the opposition leader Tony Abbott: “if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror”.

But even as her rant was going viral, its target and his supporters were complaining about Gillard’s language. By calling Abbott a misogynist, they said, she had crossed the line dividing legitimate political criticism from gratuitous personal abuse. One of Abbott’s colleagues called the accusation of woman-hatred ‘a vicious personal smear’, citing the definition of misogyny that appeared in the Macquarie Dictionary.

It is true that misogyny has undergone what students of semantic change call weakening or ‘bleaching’. Arguably, this labelling makes a material difference to our understanding of the phenomenon being labelled. About the Author: Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English. There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British English is invading America too.

"Spot on - it's just ludicrous! " snaps Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley. "You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on. Will do - I hear that from Americans. That should be put into quarantine," he adds. And don't get him started on the chattering classes - its overtones of a distinctly British class system make him quiver. But not everyone shares his revulsion at the drip, drip, drip of Britishisms - to use an American term - crossing the Atlantic. "I enjoy seeing them," says Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, and author of the forthcoming book, How to Not Write Bad. "It's like a birdwatcher.

"The words trickle down rather than trickle up," he says. Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire. 23 February 2013Last updated at 00:19 GMT By Tim Bowler Business reporter, BBC News Not all languages require the use of a future tense Could the language we speak skew our financial decision-making, and does the fact that you're reading this in English make you less likely than a Mandarin speaker to save for your old age?

It is a controversial theory which has been given some weight by new findings from a Yale University behavioural economist, Keith Chen. Prof Chen says his research proves that the grammar of the language we speak affects both our finances and our health. Bluntly, he says, if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay. Future-speak Prof Chen divides the world's languages into two groups, depending on how they treat the concept of time. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote End QuoteKeith ChenYale University Disassociating the future Findings challenged. Obama and the Racial Politics of American English.