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To err is human.  And to forgive is divine. Don’t worry, you haven’t landed on the wrong page!  I’m not going to digress with self-help therapy spiel or a treatise on the inevitability of human fallibility.  In fact, I’m going to talk about ‘er’.  It’s an innocuous...

Some strange folks believe the world is flat and that aliens abduct earthlings on a regular basis.  But there are equally bizarre convictions lurking far closer to home in the self-help section of your local bookshop. A surprising number of guides to public speaking...

Do you like a bit of tautology?  Most of us do, either consciously or not, or so it seems by the amount of repetition or redundant words that we use in the course of our daily lives.  How many times have you said, “It is what it is”, or talked about “over...

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't…” (Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) In a ‘post-truth’ world, like Alice in Wonderland, we might all be forgiven for occasionally...

As a pronunciation coach, I’m often approached by native speakers who are convinced that they need to ‘lose’ their regional accent because it’s holding them back either socially or vocationally. This presents me with a bit of quandary and shines a light on our...

  It’s always nice to discover that we’re more intelligent than we give ourselves credit for, isn’t it?  And amongst those many unknown knowns that you have mastered without realising it, is the unique ability to rank adjectives in a specific order when...

Did you know that plurals are now very out-dated? If you’re not a follower of fashion you’ll probably think I’ve taken leave of my senses, but bear with me a moment. It’s a well-known fact that business often expropriates language for applications that are...

Whether George Bernard Shaw actually uttered this much quoted phrase or not is of little importance.  What is indisputable is that there are some profound differences between British English and that spoken by our cousins across the Pond, that go far deeper than the...

Another great article by the phonologist and Guardian writer, David Shariatmadari1, gave an introduction to the fascinating phenomena of semantic bleaching and grammaticalisation. The former relates to the process whereby a word’s original meaning is reduced or lost...

In Japan the expression ‘kuuki yomenai’ (literally, someone unable to read the air) was added to the national lexicon a few years ago, perhaps in response to the influx of international company executives who were singularly unable to do so. Reading the air means to...