Category: English Language

Responsibility and Evidence in Trumpian Discourse

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Trumped Up Words Adam Hodges November 3, 2017 It started as an innocuous press conference in the White House Rose Garden. The President and Senate Majority Leader would meet with reporters to emphasize, with typical Trumpian overstatement, that they were “closer than ever before.” Then Trump got that question about the death of four soldiers killed in Niger: “And what do you have to say about that?” He replied that he had written letters to the families, which would be “going out tonight.” Then, he said he would “call the parents…

How ‘Flip’ Entered the Story of the Russia Investigation

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How ‘Flip’ Entered the Story of the Russia Investigation – Word’s history is tied to prosecutors, mobsters and novelists By Ben Zimmer Nov. 3, 2017 10:22 a.m. ET On Monday, court documents revealed that George Papadopoulos, a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump, had entered into a plea agreement after his July arrest and had tried to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This promoted speculation that the Mueller team may have “flipped” Mr. Papadopoulos. As a HuffPost headline read about the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, “Robert Mueller Flipped…

The Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) is now available!

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A message from Tony McEnery: Dear all On behalf of Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, it gives us great pleasure to announce the public release of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The Spoken BNC2014 contains 11.5 million words of transcribed informal British English conversation, recorded by (mainly English) speakers between the years 2012 and 2016. The situational context of the recordings – casual conversation among friends and family members – is designed to make the corpus broadly comparable to the demographically-sampled component of the original spoken…

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the language of dystopia

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By Chris Townsend George Orwell, who was born on the 25th of June, 1903, has never really fallen out favour with the reading public, but all the same his work is enjoying renewed interest at the moment. This is hardly surprising when you consider the adjective to which he lent his name: ‘Orwellian’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Characteristic or suggestive of the writings of George Orwell, esp. of the totalitarian state depicted in his dystopian account of the future, Nineteen Eighty-four’. It’s the dystopian part that feels so current – according…

A spat over language erupts at the World Bank

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But arguments over an excess of conjunctions may miss the point A WAR of words has flared up at the World Bank. Paul Romer, its new chief economist, has been stripped of control of the research division. An internal memo claimed that the change was to bring the operations department and research arm closer together. But many think that it was because Mr Romer clashed with staff over the Bank’s writing style. He had demanded shorter, better-written reports. In the most recent spat, Mr Romer questioned the excessive use of…