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The English language is evolving - here's how it will change after Brexit

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Britain is facing an uncertain future and an uneasy relationship with Europe after Brexit. Among other things, the country's woeful inability to learn languages has been raised as a key stumbling block - with the decline in foreign language learning among school and university students across the UK also raising alarm.

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From Cambridge Dictionary’s choice to Dictionary.com’s, here are the words believed to have captured the zeitgeist.

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2025’s words of the year reflect a year of digital disillusionment

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From AI slop to rage bait, to the cryptic ‘6-7,’ this year’s slate captures a growing sense that online life is flooded with fakery, frustration and meaninglessness.

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Is the full stop rude when used on WhatsApp?

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In the world of instant messaging, a simple punctuation mark can take on new meanings.

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Charli xcx fans rejoice: ‘Brat’ chosen as Collins word of the year

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A new definition of the word was sparked by the pop star’s summer album title, and made it a term that ‘resonated with people globally’, the dictionary says

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The ancient Cornish language has been declared dehwelans dhyworth an marow - back from the dead - amid a rise in popularity thanks to Covid-19 and a critically acclaimed psych-pop star.

There has been a significant rise in the number of people learning Cornish since the pandemic lockdown forced classes online, according to the volunteer network An Rosweyth.

"We have people in America, we have people in Australia, Mexico, Spain, Turkey," said Emma Jenkin, its support officer, who said her last online lesson had "a couple of people in Cornwall - but mostly people are dotted all over the place".

Jenkin added there had been a "huge influx" of people wanting to learn Cornish during the pandemic and the interest has kept growing - not just from those overseas who mostly have Cornish heritage, she said.

Younger people are taking up lessons as a result of its recent revival in popular culture. The singer-songwriter Gwenno's second album, Le Kov, was written and performed entirely in Cornish, and its follow-up, Tresor, was nominated for the Mercury prize. The comedian Edward Rowe, better known as Kernow King, has also helped popularise the language.

The sudden popularity is quite the turnaround for a language that was described as "extinct" by Unesco's world atlas of languages little over a decade ago. The UN's heritage agency now classifies Cornish - Kernewek - as "endangered", having been reclassified as "critically endangered" in 2010.

Only 563 people described said that Cornish was their main language in the most recent census, covering England and Wales. However, experts say this is likely to be a significant underestimate because it relates to the number of people who speak it as a first language when, in reality, most Cornish speakers use English in everyday life.

Cornwall council estimates that between 2,000 and 5,000 people can speak basic Cornish, and that number is on the rise.

A report by Language magazine last year claimed more than 4,000 people were learning Cornish across the county. According to evidence given to a parliamentary committee, more than 2,000 people were learning the language using the app Memrise while a further 200 were taking formal adult education classes.

Whereas once these classes were the preserve of retirees and amateur enthusiasts, said Jenkin, they are now becoming popular with a younger generation.

More than two dozen primary schools, representing more than 9,000 pupils, have started learning the language as part of the Go Cornish scheme.

That has created its own problem: there are not enough Cornish teachers to meet the demand. Jenkin said: "There's only one school support officer for the whole of Cornwall - and she only works part-time - so they [Go Cornish] have a waiting list because they can't do any more than what they are doing".

Denzil Monk, the chief executive of the independent production company Bosena, said artists such as Gwenno and films such as Bait and Enys Men by the Bafta-winning director Mark Jenkin were part of a renaissance in Cornwall's cultural scene.

"When I was growing up [Cornish] was seen as a historical thing and there was just a small number of people learning it," Monk said. "But it's become something that's easy to get into and accepted as something that's fun and an important part of our cultural life".

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The revival has not come about as a result of increased funding from central government, though the Cornish people were formally recognised as a national minority in law in 2014.

But recognition alone is "not enough to support a minority language from going into decline", Cornwall council said in a submission to MPs last year, describing the language as "a British cultural asset which is at risk".

Monk, who is leading an effort to foster more Cornish-language films, said he had never considered the language extinct - "maybe deeply asleep" - but that its recent revival in popular culture reflected what was happening on the ground.

More people are using bits of basic Cornish - such as dydh da for hello, or meur ras for thank you - in everyday life, he said. The language with roots stretching back thousands of years is now seen as "interesting, culturally relevant and contemporary, rather than something of the past".

Useful Cornish words

Good morning - Myttin da
Good afternoon - Dohajydh da
Thank you - Meur ras
Please - Mar pleg
More cake - Moy tesen
How's it going? - Fatla genes?
Very good - Pur dha
Evil/awful - Euthyk
I would like to - My a vynnsaHow're you doing my beauties? - Fatla genowgh hwi ow thekteryow?

This article was amended on 19 June 2024. An earlier version said that "557 people described themselves as fluent Cornish speakers in the most recent UK census". In fact this census, which covered England and Wales only, said that 563 people had described Cornish as their main language. Also, it was not the Cornish language that was formally recognised as a national minority in law in 2014, but the Cornish people.

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Cornish language revives on back of psych-pop and Covid

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Significant rise in number of people taking lessons amid surge in interest in language declared extinct a decade ago

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A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases.

The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.

Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked "everything going downhill". They urged the authority to retain them.

Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe - such as the nearby St Mary's Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it - infuriated her.

"I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation," she said.

Though the updated St Mary's sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was "brilliant".

She suggested the council was providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.

Dr Ellie Rye, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing and, often, context allows people to understand their meaning.

"If I say I live on St Mary's Walk, we're expecting a street name or an address of some kind."

She said the change would matter to people who spend a long time teaching how we write English but that it was "less important in [verbal] communication".

North Yorkshire council said it was not the first to opt to "eliminate" the apostrophe from street signs. Cambridge city council had done the same, before it bowed to pressure and reinstated the apostrophe after complaints from campaigners.

There was also an outcry from residents when Mid Devon district council considered making it a policy to do away with apostrophes to "avoid potential confusion".

A spokesperson from North Yorkshire council added: "All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.

"This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (eg apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems."

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North Yorkshire apostrophe fans demand road signs with nowt taken out

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Council says punctuation mark must go to suit computer databases, but grammar purists see signs of falling standards

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North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

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A North Yorkshire resident says the punctuation changes risk “everything going downhill”.

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For years, it has been rumoured that somebody has been going out late at night, correcting bad punctuation on Bristol shop fronts.

The self-proclaimed "grammar vigilante" goes out undercover in the dead of night correcting street signs and shop fronts where the apostrophes are in the wrong place.

Jon Kay meets grammar's answer to Banksy and reveals the extent of his one man mission to improve standards.
Listen to more in The 'Apostrophiser', Radio 4, 20:00 BST, Monday 3 April, or afterwards on the BBC iPlayer.

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One man's 13-year mission to correct punctuation mistakes on public signs.

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Many of the OED blog posts have been moved to our Discoverability hubs. In these hubs, you will find overviews on the history of English, commentaries on the etymology and…

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Name: "Yours sincerely".

Age: Roughly 300 years old.

Appearance: Formal, elegant, dying.

This is troubling news indeed. Why are you suddenly talking like a Victorian?

I am merely expressing my sadness about the unpopularity of the formal valediction. God, you're so boring. Do you really still write "Yours sincerely" at the end of emails?

Doesn't everyone? This is the 21st century, grandpa. Who in their right mind would out themselves as sincere? Yuck.

So "Yours sincerely" is dead? Not dead, but dying. A survey by Barclays reveals that young people see the phrase as old-fashioned and boring. That means it basically has a decade left, tops.

What do they write instead - "R egards"? Absolutely not. The same survey dismissed "Regards" as formal and boring. Not to mention the fact that it makes the writer sound like a cold, hate-filled psychopath.

Does it? Oh yes. "Regards" is like running your finger along your neck without breaking eye contact with someone.

Then what? "Best wishes" seems to be the way to go. It is seen as friendly and warm.

It's far too familiar. My parents were married for 70 years and would never have dared to say anything as intimate as "Best wishes" to each other. Oh no, you're going to hate how people begin their messages now.

How about "Dear"? Much too formal.

"To whom it may concern"? Try "Hiya".

Hiya! What has this country become? It's become friendly and casual, that's what, with no need to be tied to the frilly formality of old. The way we message has sped up so much that it's better to think of each email as part of a single, larger conversation. You don't say "Yours sincerely" every time you stop talking during a conversation, do you?

A fair point. I've just checked my last 100 work emails and not one begins "Dear". Plenty of "Hiyas", a bunch of "Heys" and a "Morning mate". Most didn't bother with a greeting at all, instead just ploughing into the body of the message.

So do I need to start dropping "Yours sincerely" from my correspondence? Yes, but don't try too hard to keep with the trends because they move fast. "Best wishes" even seems quite formal these days. Try signing off with "Best" or "Thanks" - or just your name. Honestly, nobody minds any more.

Are there no other alternatives? Well, judging by my inbox, you could always experiment with something along the lines of "Please resign". That seems a common one.

Maybe that's you. I don't like your attitude.

Do say: "Thanks (I appreciate your message)."

Don't say: "Regards (I hate you and wish you were dead)."

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'Yours sincerely' is dead. So how should you sign off an email?

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Informality is all that matters now. Even 'Regards' is old-fashioned and boring, according to a new survey

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Is it the end for Yours sincerely? Old phrases will die out over the next decade as language becomes less formal, research finds

Study into work emails suggests starting with 'Dear' will also be out of fashion

Phrases such as 'Yours sincerely' will die out in the next ten years as language becomes less formal due to instant messaging, according to research.

A study into workplace emails suggests that starting with 'Dear' will also soon become thing of the past.

The influence of text messaging and the rise in home working has made offices more informal and relaxed, which reflects how we write.

Emails are now more likely to end work with 'Kind regards' or 'Many thanks' with younger workers even choosing phrases such as 'Cheers', 'Ta', 'Speak soon' or 'TY' - an abbreviation of thank you.

According to a survey of 2,000 people by Barclays LifeSkills, 37 per cent described 'Yours sincerely' as 'old fashioned', while 10 per cent said it was 'boring'.

Meanwhile, 6 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they found the phrase 'intimidating'.

'Regards' is viewed as 'formal' and 'boring' by 46 per cent and 11 per cent of respondents, respectively.

By contrast, 'Best wishes' is considered 'friendly' by 41 per cent, and 'warm' by 24 per cent.

Starting an email with 'Dear' is also falling out of favour as 35 per cent describe it as 'old fashioned' and 9 per cent say its 'boring'.

'Hiya' may seem overly casual, but younger workers would not bat an eyelid when receiving an email starting this way.

Just 17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds think of it as over-familiar, although this soars to 34 per cent of those aged 45 to 54. Overall, 42 per cent consider it to be 'friendly'.

Many are noticing this shift with 71 per cent saying 'the younger generation are changing the formality of language in the workplace' and 69 per cent believing that phrases have evolved over the past five years.

Reliance on technology such as instant messaging platforms at work is seen as the biggest single factor, at 34 per cent.

Working from home and Gen Z entering the workplace are also cited as having a major influence.

Four in ten - 41 per cent - believe 'Yours truly' will become 'extinct' in the next 10 years and 36 per cent say no one will use 'Yours sincerely' within the same timeframe.

Other phrases set to die out include 'To whom it may concern', 'With compliments' and the use of 'Dear'.

But the research suggests more modern email sign-offs may not hit the mark with everyone.

To bridge the gap between different generations and levels of seniority in the workplace, using 'Kind regards' would seem the best and safest option.

While 51 per cent consider the term formal, 'Kind regards' is felt to strike the right balance by many who say it also sounds 'friendly' (34 per cent) and 'warm' (20 per cent). Only 17 per cent consider it old fashioned.

Exclamation marks are to be treated with caution too. More than half - 54 per cent - say overusing them is 'unprofessional', and 41 per cent say those who use them in work emails come across as 'too enthusiastic'.

Kirstie Mackey, head of Barclays LifeSkills, said: 'Our research shows the next generation are clearly going to make their mark on the workforce when it comes to how we communicate.'

She added: 'The shift to more personable language is a positive one, however it's important to demonstrate an understanding of social etiquette in the workplace, which does differ from school or university.

'Striking the right balance whilst still displaying your personality through your communications is key.'

Dr Laura Bailey, senior lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Kent, said: 'Changing norms in the workplace are reflected in the language younger employees use, and the way communication has changed in general.

'Email threads and instant messaging platforms have become blended into 'conversations' where formal openings and sign-offs might feel out of place.

'For the older generation, letter-writing etiquette might be drilled in enough that it is instinctive in any written communication, whereas for Gen Z, social media has driven linguistic change and sped up the spread of language trends.'

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Old phrases will die out over the next decade, research finds

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A study into workplace emails suggests that starting with 'Dear' will also soon become thing of the past.

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'Nepo baby', 'deinfluencing', 'canon event': the internet has developed new vocabulary to counteract the image of perfection it once encouraged. Instead, the shortlist reveals, we are pushed towards yet more self-narrative

Collins has announced its 'words of the year' shortlist and winner for 2023 (Photo: Getty Images)

Of all the end-of-year round-ups that inevitably begin come November - from Spotify Wrapped to Sainsbury's top customers - the most revealing of the annual tenor has got to be the " words of the year" from the Collins, Cambridge, Merriam Webster and Oxford dictionaries. Over the past few years, the chosen words of various dictionaries have included "permacrisis", "NFT", " lockdown ", "fake news", "gaslighting", "pandemic" and "post-truth", giving an indication of the political and cultural climate.

Though sometimes the words are highly specific - "lockdown" and "pandemic" being the most obvious - sometimes they are more nebulous, or linked to a niche cultural phenomenon as opposed to a universal experience. In 2004, for example, the OED's word of the year was "bovvered" - stemming directly from the "am I bovvered" Catherine Tate sketch that was so popular at the time. Last year, it was "goblin mode" - an internet term celebrating slatternly behaviour.

And now, Collins has announced its shortlist and winner for 2023. This year, " AI" has come out on top - not strictly a word, but an acronym standing for "artificial intelligence", and referring to the alarmingly sharp increase in the prevalence of robots in our lives, through software like ChatGPT. The shortlist also features "ultra-processed", a word that has grown in traction this year following the release of Chris Van Tulleken's best-selling book Ultra Processed People and "greedflation", the phenomenon whereby businesses use inflation as an excuse to inflate their prices artificially.

But in the more nebulous cultural sphere are some words and phrases that reveal a lot about the shifting cultural patterns in contemporary life: namely " nepo baby ", "deinfluencing" and "canon event". What these reveal is that the internet is finally catching up with itself: or, put more simply, that people are no longer seeking the image of the perfect life that has been sold to us online over the past 10 years, and instead are looking to debunk bullshit.

"Nepo baby" refers, of course, to people whose career has been advanced by having celebrity parents (Collins stipulates that it most commonly applies to people in the entertainment industry). Nepo babies have been around since showbiz began - but the term has picked up traction this year because of the kind of collective outing of them - from Iris Law to Kylie Jenner - that serves to demonstrate the realities of success. While we are often sold the idea that anyone can be rich and famous, increased awareness of nepo babies means people are better acquainted with the reality that it's a lot easier to make it in entertainment if you have someone who can get you in the door.

Similarly, "deinfluencing" is obviously a direct counter to "influencing" ("influencer", as it happens, was on the Collins shortlist in 2019) - a word that has become fully absorbed into common parlance over the last few years, essentially referring to an individual selling products via social media. "Deinfluencing" refers to a growing phenomenon whereby people with large followings essentially tell us what not to buy - again, something that seeks to cut through the stream of content that shows us that perfect lifestyles are attainable simply by buying more stuff.

Crucially, though, even deinfluencing still looks to further the "personal brand". It gives you clout among your followers and increases your image as someone with integrity and authenticity.

Although the social media pivot to "authenticity" has been hailed almost unchallenged as a positive thing in recent times, it's not quite so straightforward. Everything we do online is a performance of some kind, which means even authenticity - the thing that's supposed to be the antidote to performance - can become staged. What we've seen in opposition to the "highlight reels" that were encouraged in the early days of Instagram and Facebook is instead the quest for self-narrative: which means documenting the good, the bad and the ugly for everyone to see.

Which brings us to "canon event" - another phrase identified by Collins as definitive of 2023. Online, this is used to refer to particularly seismic happenings in the lives of individuals that are perceived to have gone on to define their identities (the trend stems from the recent Spider Mananimated film Across the Spider-Verse, which centres on a series of events that defined Spider Man - for example, getting bitten by a radioactive magic spider and turning into a superhero). This could, when laced with typical social media irony, encompass anything from childhood trauma to a haircut - the important point is that the "canon event" contributes to the impression of the person given to their followers on social media.

All of this is to say that, although Collins' word of the year may seem a little obvious, in the shortlist there is much to reveal the current state of culture. Online communities still have huge influence. Celebrities are increasingly under scrutiny. We are no longer putting up with bullshit. And, perhaps somewhat reassuringly, we are still just as self-obsessed as ever.

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The Collins word of the year shortlist shows we're more self-obsessed than ever

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'Nepo baby', 'deinfluencing', 'canon event': the internet has developed new vocabulary to counteract the image of perfection it once encouraged. Instead, the shortlist reveals, we are pushed towards yet more self-narrative

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Collins Dictionary Word of the Year 2023

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Collins Dictionary Word of the Year 2023

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Got rizz? Tom Holland memes propel popularity of 2023 word of the year

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Gen Z slang for charm or attractiveness sees off ‘Swiftie’, ‘situationship’ and ‘prompt’ in judges’ decision

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Are you good at chatting up or flirting with potential partners? If so, you may already have rizz, even if you didn't know it.

The Oxford word of the year, internet slang for romantic appeal or charm, is mostly used by young people.

It was one of eight words on a shortlist, all chosen to reflect the mood, ethos or preoccupations of 2023.

The list was narrowed down in a public vote, before Oxford lexicographers made the final decision.

Other contenders ranged from Swiftie to beige flag to situationship.

The word might not mean anything to you if you're not Generation Z.

But it's used massively online, with billions of views of the hashtag "rizz" on TikTok.

According to Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, it is defined as style, charm, or attractiveness, and the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.

The term is thought to be a shortened form of the word "charisma".

It can also be used as a verb, in sayings such as "to rizz up", which means to attract, seduce, or chat someone up.

It's essentially a newer version of "game", defined as skill, prowess, and the ability to attract others sexually by using one's charm.

YouTuber and Twitch streamer Kai Cenat is widely credited as having popularised the term rizz, which he used with his friends.

Usage of the word continued to climb this year, and in June, actor Tom Holland was asked by Buzzfeed about the secret to his rizz.

Holland replied: "I have no rizz whatsoever. I have limited rizz," before explaining he won over his girlfriend Zendaya by playing the "long game".

Last year's Oxford word of the year was "goblin mode", another slang term describing "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy" behaviour.

Casper Grathwohl, president at Oxford Languages, said that while "goblin mode" had resonated with many people after the pandemic, "it's interesting to see a contrasting word like rizz come to the forefront".

He said the word possibly spoke to "a prevailing mood of 2023, where more of us are opening ourselves up after a challenging few years and finding confidence in who we are".

Mr Grathwohl added that the rise in use of the word rizz proved that words and phrases that derive from internet culture "are increasingly becoming part of day-to-day vernacular".

The shortlist of eight words was selected by the language experts at Oxford University Press.

That list was then put to a public vote in late November, reducing the field to four finalists, before the experts made the final selection.

In November, the makers of Collins Dictionary revealed their word of 2023 as "artificial intelligence".

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Rizz named word of the year 2023 by Oxford University Press

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The word, internet slang for romantic appeal or charm, beat Swiftie, situationship and beige flag.

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Joe Mc Kay's "Crazy About Words"
...toasting our language since 2003!

It's a shame that this noun phrase is no longer in common use. I discovered it recently in The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten, by Jeffrey Kacirk. I was relieved to know it, because I have long felt at a loss for what to call all the wonderful words, phrases, and expressions writers come up with to make our language more vivid. I have, at times, referred to them as "writerly" inventions, but that's not a name that sticks as "inkhorn terms" once did.

The words that writers and speakers invent or derive to enhance and color our communications, ought to have a name. If the "tips of shoelaces" deserve "aglets" (from French, aguille for needle), then surely a noble handle is due what were once called "inkhorn terms."

I understand how it faded from use. Who knows anymore what the heck an "inkhorn" is? ... even "ink" is not understood as it once was ... perhaps better known now as the fluid an octopus employs for defense than as the medium of writers. Animal horns were used, like powderhorns, to carry quills and ink and were once a symbol of the writer's trade.

"Inkhorn term" was originally used derisively in the late 1500s, (during the transition from Middle English to Modern English), by purists defending the Anglo-Saxon language against the incursion of Latin, Greek, and French words being introduced by writers to combat the limitations of the largely four-letter-word A-S vocabulary. "The most ancient English wordes are of one syllable, so that the more monosyllables you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the Inkhorne." George Gascoigne, 1575.

The purists agreed that the language needed more words, but thought they could be created out of what people already knew. Had they prevailed, we might today be using simple, derivative words such as 'gleeman' for musician, 'inwit' for conscience, 'yeartide' for anniversary, 'starlore' for astronomy, and 'speechcraft' for grammar. But language progressives won the day and a flood of Renaissance-era inkhorn words were embraced. Among them: anonymous, catastrophe, expectation, lunar, and pathetic.

Modern English continues to expand as it begs the imaginations of people who love language, borrows from other languages, and steals outright from everywhere. "Hedonists" were simply "pleasure seekers" until someone went for the Greek root in the mid 1800s. "Humongous" combined "huge" and "monstrous" on a U.S. college campus in 1967 and spread like wildfire into everyday use. "Wildfire" is an invented word that relies on the double meaning of 'wild' for its sense; in Spanish, one has to say " incendios en areas naturales " and even that long phrase doesn't capture the rage involved.

Because of this expansive quality born of the "Inkhorne Controversy," English today is the "go-to" language for people around the world seeking common ground in communication. The origin of "dust bunny" cannot be traced beyond the fact of its U.S. origin, but you might well hear the term in the middle of a sentence spoken in another language. Similarly, "control freak," "bunker mentality," "brain trust" and "shazam" are modern terms originated by writers, but lacking a word that defines them.

I believe that if you hundreds of "Crazy About Words" readers put your minds to it, we'll come up with a good idea for a word or phrase that redefines these "inkhorn terms" for modern times. Then I'll work to spread it around among dictionary editors. So, let's try some crowdsourcing.

Send your ideas to crazyaboutwords@gmail.com

Joe Mc Kay
May 2012

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Joe Mc Kay's "Crazy About Words" ...toasting our language since 2003!

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English punctuation is going to the dog's. Or perhaps I mean it has already gone to the dogs' . . .

Pardon my apostrophes. Readers who care about these things will know that I ought to say punctuation is going to the dogs. Four letters and not an apostrophe in sight.

If I were to talk about a dog's dinner, however, I'd use an apostrophe to indicate that the dinner belongs to the dog. It's all a bit of a minefield, which is why perhaps, according to a report from Lancaster University this week, the apostrophe may be dying out altogether.

The trend is largely down to social media, where speed and space are everything. Why say 'you're' when you can speed-type 'youre' or - worse - 'your'? And why bother with the complicated rules for possessive apostrophes, which differentiate between singular and plural nouns, when you can just ignore them altogether?

Is it elephants' trunks, elephant's trunks, or elephants trunks? Too late, you've already pressed 'send'. (The answer, should you need it, is the first.) We are all speaking with our fingers, hammering out messages at speed on our touch screens, replicating the informality of speech.

The researchers examined a database of 100 million words drawn from the past 30 years, and its results clearly show the ways our language is evolving. It discovered, for example, an 8 per cent decrease in the use of an apostrophe after a 'possessive plural' noun compared with the early 1990s.

It's a tricky rule to master, but it can make a serious difference, as an estate agent named Anthony Zadravic in Australia found out to his cost last month. Mr Zadravic posted a sarcastic comment on Facebook, accusing a former employer of failing to pay him money owed under a pension agreement.

'Selling multi million $ homes in Pearl Beach but can't pay his employees superannuation,' wrote a disgruntled Mr Zadravic. His former boss filed a claim for defamation because of the missing apostrophe in the word 'employees'.

Mr Zadravic was talking about himself only, so he should have put an apostrophe before the letter 's' - 'his employee's superannuation'.

Sending the case to trial, the judge remarked: 'The difficulty for the plaintiff is the use of the word "employees" in the plural. To fail to pay one employee's superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate.'

If the trial goes against Mr Zadravic, the judge added, it could cost him more than $180,000 (£98,500). That's an expensive bit of missing punctuation.

Some people, on the other hand, err on the side of additional punctuation. They tend to go a bit mad!!!!! Exclamation mark exuberance is spilling over everywhere - and not everyone is a fan.

'All those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head,' mused author Terry Pratchett, who wasn't a fan of the most excitable member of the punctuation set.

Yet a lot of us, it seems, quite enjoy having our linguistic underwear on show.

And if apostrophes are struggling, you can forget colons and semi-colons. The dramatist Ben Jonson, arguably Britain's greatest punctuator, loved the colon so much he inserted one between his first and last name in his signature, 'Ben: Jonson', but few would show such commitment now.

The colon is frequently left unused - instead, we are all turning to the dash. Traditionally viewed as a lazy jack-of-all-trades, the dash is certainly quick.

It requires the smallest of finger-stretches on our touchscreen or keyboard and crucially avoids any head-scratching over the finer points of punctuation.

We are all becoming, quite literally, slapdash. As for semi-colons, they are almost out the door. Personally, I love them, almost as much as I do a good adverb, and I use them everywhere. But I'm a nerd who finds them instinctively elegant.

Few would ever put one in a WhatsApp message, where they would surely stick out like a sore thumb, or an inadvertent aubergine emoji.

Recently, even the full stop has come under fire. Young people, it is said, find it aggressive.

If this idea makes you snort, you're not alone. I also found it preposterous that a single and surely necessary dot could inspire such dislike.

But when I looked more carefully at the reasons for it, I began to understand. No one (I hope) is saying we can dispense with the full stop altogether. But if you were to tell a friend that you'd won the lottery, you might expect a punctuation-less 'Amazing' in return - or, better still, an 'Amazing!'.

What wouldn't seem quite so heartfelt is the flat response, 'Amazing.'. In this case, the full stop surely suggests a touch of envy, of resentment even, not of genuine pleasure in a friend's good fortune and happiness.

Either way, it's unlikely that any of your friends will send you congratulations in beautiful copperplate handwriting.

As Lancaster University's Dr Vaclav Brezina said, publishing his report: 'We text or message friends and colleagues, and get an immediate response, but we might be hard-pressed to remember when we last wrote a letter.'

The way we communicate is constantly changing, and that means there will always be headlines bemoaning that, once more, the golden age of English is dead. This is far from new. In the 18th century, Jonathan Swift was racked with anxiety over the future of English, complaining that 'our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions'.

Among his damning observations of the 'Abuses and Absurdities' of English is that 'Most of the Books we see now-a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations'. Centuries later, those abbreviations are an integral part of daily conversation.

Are these latest findings further proof that English is falling down a very slippery slope? Can the apostrophe hold out against the current tide of indifference?

I like to think of questions like these as 'foofaraws' - a big commotion or fuss over something we need not worry so much about.

We have always feared new technology. When the telegram arrived, some saw it as the death-knell to expressive language. The Victorians also feared that the postcard would kill off proper writing. It was just the same at the dawn of the internet, with predictions that language would become bland and monosyllabic.

None of these fears has materialised. Like every other aspect of English, punctuation is merely adapting to our needs.

It is not the rules and regulations of dusty Latin grammars that matter, but the beauty and clarity of our communication.

My guess is that few of us would leave out an apostrophe when writing to our child's headteacher. On the other hand, if we choose to have an exclamation mark bonanza in a text message to our friends, that is up to us.

We have always been remarkably adept at code-switching, and language is a perfect example. As for the bigger question, 'Will English ever recover?' - the answer has to be yes. Language has always evolved as society itself moves on.

We should learn the rules, for sure, but that doesn't mean we can't break them among friends.

If you want to wear your underpants on your head, then please go ahead. Just don't do it too often in public.

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When it comes to words, we don't have to follow the letter of the law

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English punctuation is going to the dog's. Or perhaps I mean it has already gone to the dogs' . . . Pardon my apostrophes. Readers who care about these things will know that I ought to say punctuation is going to the dogs. Four letters and not an apostrophe in sight.

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LANGUAGE CHANGE OVER TIME EXPLAINED! | ENGLISH LANGUAGE A LEVEL REVISION | NARRATOR: BARBARA NJAU

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Language change revision theories and attitudes

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Language change revision theories and attitudes

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English Language Change: Theories & Attitudes | A LEVEL REVISION | NARRATOR: BARBARA NJAU

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Fab for language change revision

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Teachers in UK report growing 'vocabulary deficiency'

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Problem exists throughout primary and secondary school, leading to lower self-esteem and negative behaviour

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Why is everyone talking about Karen?
Dan, by email
Karen has been a busy lady of late. There have been more than 816m views to TikTok videos dedicated to the Karen meme, and last week, just days before Jess Phillips was appointed shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, over 11,000 people liked a tweet saying "BREAKING: Jess Phillips assigned Shadow Karen Minister." But Karen? Who the frick is Karen? Well, as Jennifer Aniston would say, here's the science bit.

"Karen" is commonly used in the US to refer to a strident middle-class white woman who talks down to people of colour, usually in serving-staff positions. But the term was never just about racial oppression. As Vox wrote in its extremely extensive history of the trope, the comedian Dane Cook was using it in his act in 2005: "Every [friendship] group has a Karen, and she's always a bag of douche." The term went more mainstream a few years ago when someone on Reddit wrote so much bile about his ex-wife that his posts got their own subreddit called "r/FuckYouKaren". One of the most popular ever tweets using the Karen meme was posted a month ago, just before the lockdown: "I'm scared for people who actually need to go to the store & feed their fams but Susan and Karen stocked up for 30 years." This was liked 1.2m times, because only women shop, apparently (and shop selfishly). This weekend, the Sunday Times defined Karen as "an annoying person in the office", and you have to admire the use of the genderless word "person" there because I'd love to know how many men out there have been called "a Karen". I'm gonna guess it's a feminine, curvaceous zero. "Karens are moms - pushy ones. They share corny inspirational quotes on Facebook, buy merchandise inscribed with 'Love Life Laugh' and love to ruin teenage fun," Elaine Moore wrote in the FT. Moore adds that Karen is her "favourite internet villain". Pushy mothers: aren't they THE WORST? Lolz.

The Karen chat stepped up a notch last week when the feminist writer Julie Bindel tweeted: "Does anyone else think the 'Karen' slur is woman-hating and based on class prejudice?" Cue a social media firestorm, one I blithely wandered into: "Yes - it's sexist, ageist and classist, in that order." Soon, I had thousands of responses. Some were from people of colour, frustrated that the term's original meaning had been lost and that two white women were denigrating a term they use to describe racism, and fair enough. But they were at least equalled by men gleefully calling me a Karen ("OK, Karen") and telling me to make them a sandwich. Truly, few things warm the heart like the palpable excitement of men when they find a new misogynistic term they can lob at women with impunity.

Do I really need to spell out the sexism of a meme about a woman's name that took off from a man griping about his ex-wife and has become a way of telling women to shut up? Yes, there are memes about Chad and Zach, but these have never gained the popularity of ones about Becky, Susan or Tammy, let alone Karen. When I see young (and not so young) white women defending the Karen meme, I'm reminded of the Cool Girl passage in Gone Girl: yeah, I'm not a basic pushy-mum-type woman - I'm a cool girl. Mmm, let's see how long denigrating your own sex works for you, ladies.

Next, ageism: "Karen", as we have established, is a mother. One with multiple children, as Vox put it. So we're probably talking middle age here. Middle-aged women - ew!

Finally, class. Whatever upper-middle connotations Karen might have in the US, in the UK the name is not posh. Try substituting Karen for Emily, Freya, Alice or Isabel and the meme doesn't work. It is no coincidence that a tweet calling Jess Phillips a Karen was so popular, given Phillips grew up working-class, is a mother and - not wanting to shock anyone here - a woman. Tick, tick, tick.

Contrary to what some silly articles have claimed, no serious person is equating Karen with the N-word. People of colour should describe their experiences of racism in whatever language works for them. But women should also be free to point out when a trope has become mired in sexism without being accused of being humourless old shrews, ie Karens. No one wants to be a Karen, amirite? The Karen meme has become a way of not just describing women's behaviour, but controlling it. No wonder so many men enjoy it.
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com
This article was amended on 14 April 2020 because an earlier version referred to the timing of the tweet in relation to Jess Phillips as 'after' her appointment as a shadow minister. In fact it was just days before her appointment.

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The 'Karen' meme is everywhere - and it has become mired in sexism

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Why is everyone talking about Karen? Dan, by email Karen has been a busy lady of late. There have been more than 816m views to TikTok videos dedicated to the Karen meme, and last week, just days before Jess Phillips was appointed shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, over 11,000 people liked a tweet saying "BREAKING: Jess Phillips assigned Shadow Karen Minister."

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Le circonflexe est mort, vive le circonflexe. Last week all hell broke loose when a story emerged that the French language was about to lose its circumflex - the 'ˆ' symbol that appears above some letters. Never mind that the change applied only to certain vowels, in certain words, that it was decided 26 years ago and that the ruling was optional. For many people, this was madness: This! Is! Spelling!

Social media adopted #JeSuisCirconflexe ('I am circumflex') as a protest hashtag, and words like massacre were trotted out. This might seem a touch extreme, but it is nothing new: similar reactions followed Waterstones' decision to drop the apostrophe from its brand name and the (erroneous) belief that Oxford University Press had abandoned the Oxford comma.

Reports of the circumflex's death are exaggerated, but they point to the intensity of feeling aroused by orthography - how personally we relate to something with so arbitrary a connection to meaning. Usage dictionaries reveal age-old disputes that erupt anew every day. Some of the most passionate are over spelling, which, as H.G. Wells wrote, has 'become mixed up with moral feeling'.

English bristles with spelling-related discord, a result of its slightly chaotic system born of hybrid origins, diverse influences, scribal interference and other historical contingencies. (Though English is essentially phonemic - that is, its spelling reflects its pronunciation - its sounds correspond to letter patterns as well as single letters, causing learners particular trouble.) Onto this massive melange, teachers, grammarians and hobbyist reformers have tried for centuries to impose their ideas - and ideals - of spelling.

Spelling reform began at least as early as the 12th century, when the unknown author of the Fyrsta Málfræðiritgerðin ('First Grammatical Treatise') adapted the Latin alphabet for Old Icelandic, detailing the phonological principles behind the task. And as Old English segued into Middle English, an attempt to systematise the multitude of variation was made by the monk Orm, described by David Crystal in Evolving English as the first reformer of English spelling.

How we turn thoughts and experiences into speech and text will always be idiosyncratic. It used to be more so: people wrote as they spoke, so variation in dialect begat variation in text. With the printing press came partial standardisation. We don't call eggs eyren, but it could easily have been otherwise. English after Caxton was gradually codified but remained heterogeneous and subject to constant change and stresses. That it drifted more in spoken than written form is another reason for the disparity between its spelling and pronunciation.

Reform efforts began in earnest in the 16th century with Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith, who reconstructed ancient Greek pronunciation and then applied themselves to English; Smith published a 34-letter alphabet to better map onto its sounds. Momentum continued in a different direction with John Hart, who found English 'learned hard and evil to read', full of confusion, disorder, 'vices and corruptions'. In his ambitious Orthographie (1569) - one of three books he wrote on the topic - he set out a bold form of spelling based on speech sounds and aimed at correcting the 'many abuses' of English writing:

Whereby you may perceive that our single sounding and use of letters, may in process of time, bring our whole nation to one certain, perfect and general speaking.

Hart practised what he preached, writing Orthographie in his original system ('hierbei iu mẹ persẹv'). It was not generally adopted, but Crystal finds that Hart's views helped 'form the climate that would eventually shape the character of English spelling'. Otto Jespersen was another admirer, calling Hart's principles 'excellent' and the man himself 'an honest scholar' and 'the first phonetician of the modern period'.

Hart's preference for omitting superfluous letters was shared by the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster, whose influential proto-spelling-dictionary Elementarie (1582) listed thousands of words in regularised spelling patterns. Mulcaster wanted to 'thouroughli rip up the hole certaintie of our English writing' for the greater good of England. His work, writes Susana Doval Suárez, had support from Elizabeth I because it was based on tradition, which was 'of great importance for a country still looking for its national identity'. Mulcaster's judgements were astute: more than half match today's forms.

In 1662 the Royal Society was founded. It soon created a committee for 'improving the English language', including spelling reform. But it seems the committee - which featured John Dryden, John Evelyn and a score of other luminaries - lasted just a few meetings.

Reform efforts can be sudden or slow. Sudden ones need power behind them, such as a government's, yet may still fail. Germany reformed its orthography in 1996, but criticism was fast and fierce and publishers soon reverted to the previous system. Most reform efforts, like Germany's, take the form of standardising: changing the arrangement of existing letters. Others supplement or augment with new letters, while a third set supplants with a wholly new alphabet.

In 1873 Isaac Pitman proposed a supplementing reform in his Phonetic Journal, adding 15 new letters to the '23 useful letters' of the existing alphabet ( c, q and x were dismissed). Benjamin Franklin tried a similar tack. A more radical, supplanting approach was favoured by George Bernard Shaw (who, incidentally, wrote in Pitman's shorthand). Shaw left money in his will towards the effort, and a competition was held to find the best submission. The winning system - like Pitman's, Franklin's and countless others - slipped into obscurity.

Far more successful was Noah Webster. Though most of his recommendations in the early 19th century were not taken up ( soop, aker, thum, wo), the few that were altered US English in characteristic ways. Within a century, several dedicated spelling-reform groups had sprung up on either side of the Atlantic, among them the Spelling Reform Association (1876), Simplified Spelling Board (1906) and Simplified Spelling Society (1908), now the English Spelling Society. A bill submitted to UK Parliament in 1949 by this last group was defeated by a mere three votes, and 'Nue Spelling' faded into the archives. Lobby groups had modest success in America and Australia but ultimately failed to overcome tradition and opposition.

Webster's reforms invited counter-reforms to repair the resulting rift between UK and US English. In 1968 Robert Burchfield (editor of the OED Supplement) and Philip Gove (editor-in-chief of Webster's Third New International Dictionary) discussed trading off spelling changes to bring the dialects closer together. But nothing came of it.

Full discussion of the pros and cons of spelling reform is beyond the scope of this post. History indicates, however, that in order to succeed, any planned changes must be minor. Substantial reforms would require centralised authority and a critical mass of collective, coherent will - neither of which seems likely. For many people the discontinuities would be an unacceptable price for the practical gain, to say nothing of the political and logistical obstacles to reforming so mutable, diverse and global a language.

Writing serves as an approximation or extension of speech and is subject to mistakes and meanderings just as our minds are. Fads and anomalies of one century can become routine in the next. Reform would somehow have to keep up. If reformers all agreed on a system, they might stand a chance - but there are almost as many proposals as there are reformers. Their ambitions of orthographic engineering are likely to be frustrated.

Without an official authority to impose order, the power to steer English is distributed among its users: millions cast a vote, and general usage governs by leaderless default, with guidance available from teachers, editors, lexicographers and the like. Writing his great Dictionary, Samuel Johnson was won round to this democratic state of affairs: 'sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride'. Modern linguists think similarly, and may even see it as an advantage: 'The looser the system, the greater its general usefulness,' observes Steven Roger Fischer in his History of Writing.

Language is a dynamic phenomenon beyond the total control of any entity - be it a person, institution, or social movement. Standardisation establishes vital common ground, yet within the blurry borders of standard English, many varieties cohabit, including forms of spelling. Dictionaries belie the extent of variation by presenting a single spelling of each word. Larger dictionaries add variants that hint at the greater menagerie, but even here - OED aside - they select only the most common and legitimate alternatives.

Years of familiar use put us on intimate terms with a word; it becomes part of our extended identity. When a convention is changed abruptly we may be unsettled, even outraged. But go back a few generations and you will find school copybooks full of diacritics: role was rôle, and so on. These forms are by no means extinct - the famously retains them - but they are minority usages, seldom missed by most. Whatever the fate of France's circumflex, and for all the recent panic, we can expect the academy's ruling to have little effect on the vitality of human expression.

is a writer and copy editor from Galway, Ireland. He writes about language on Sentence First, Macmillan Dictionary Blog.

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A brief history of English spelling reform

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Le circonflexe est mort, vive le circonflexe. Last week all hell broke loose when a story emerged that the French language was about to lose its circumflex - the 'ˆ' symbol that appears above some letters. Never mind that the change applied only to certain vowels, in certain words, that it was decided 26 years ago and that the ruling was optional.

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Karina Galperin: Should we simplify spelling?

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How much energy and brain power do we devote to learning how to spell? Language evolves over time, and with it the way we spell -- is it worth it to spend so much time memorizing rules that are filled with endless exceptions?

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Miss Cooper: AS and A2 English Language Revision for  AQA Specification B

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1. Is Stephen Fry a descriptivist? Prescriptivist? Provide evidence? 2. What does he suggest about people and their use of language/attitude towards language? 3. Note any interesting terms.

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Technology Thinking.

We are getting used to the idea of rapidly developing technologies changing what we can do and how we do things. What most people haven't considered is how technologies affect our language and how these changes are affecting the way we speak and even the way we think.

One of the key ways we see this is when the name of a company becomes a way of doing something involving any product that is similar. Classic examples are "to hoover" which came from the early dominance of vaccuum cleaners from the Hoover Company.

Googling becomes a verb

More significantly is the use of the term "to google" which first came to prominence in 2002 when the American Dialect Society declared it word of the year. Later, in 2009, they declared "google" to be the the word of the decade.

Google had become a generic word meaning "to search the Internet" with any search engine, not just Google itself. But googling has become much more than just the mere act of typing words into a text box and clicking a button. We now understand the subtext when someone declares "I have googled you" or even that they have googled themselves. The idea that this act can now exert a powerful effect on the opinion we form of others has even resulted in laws formulated by the European Union giving individuals rights over search engine companies to have information about them removed in order to be "forgotten".

Google has now become our collective global memory and googling is the process by which we access those memories. This, in turn, is simply a process that we have always engaged with called " transactive memory " in which we turn to people around us, usually people we know, to help us recall facts and memories. The invention of the Gutenberg press allowed us to outsource people to books. The difference now though is that Google is now always with us, has a vast database of information that it is getting increasingly better at letting you access, with the vaguest of questions. This in turn has had a dramatic effect on what we are able to achieve, not only as individuals, but as a society.

The act of computer programming for example has become much easier through the ability to learn new computer languages and solve problems by "googling" the answers. It could be argued that the boom in mobile phone apps would not have been possible without Ggoogle providing a mechanism to access the "transactive memories" of the thousands of knowledgeable programmers with the answers to any developer's questions.

Interestingly, it has been [Google] themselves who have resisted, even at times through legal threats, the spread of "google" being used beyond its reference to the company. This is because if it does enter the language as a common term, Google could lose the protection of the name as a trademark. If Google becomes a common term, to mean any generic search, it could become a "generic trademark" like Cellophane, Aspirin, Escalator and others.

Industries become uberized

In a different example of a verb that has come from a proper noun but may have just as significant an impact on our social lives, we have "to uberize". This comes from the company Uber whose business approach has disrupted an industry by using mobile apps backed with data analytics to provide cheaper taxi services to consumers. The concept of "uberization" has taken the general meaning of disrupting any industry through the use of technology to circumvent unnecessary bureaucracy and legislation. What is interesting about the use of the term uberization is that again, the subtext is not just about the actual process of transforming an industry into something more efficient or productive. Saying that an industry needs to be "uberized" is as much a commentary about its unwillingness to change, modernise and really meet consumers' needs. This context is being built up with every new development in the ongoing battles and controversies that Uber is facing as it pushes through its disruption of the taxi industry.

Uber's less successful contribution to our language has been the concept of " surge pricing". The concept embodies basic economic principles to ensure that there are taxis willing to pick up consumers at the busiest times. It turns out that this is too hard for most consumers (and reporters) to understand and they have interpreted it simply as unfair price gouging.

As a new term, it is an interesting example however of how a term that was supposed to have a specific meaning has been turned into something completely different through popular usage.

How much has changed

There are many conversations that we could have today that would mean little to someone from 2005. Even though the definition of specific words could be given, it would need the entire context of how they have developed through the interplay of technology, individuals and society to have any real meaning. This is not the first time this has happened in history but certainly the increase in the pace of change has resulted in our language changing equally rapidly, and with it, our thoughts.

On a final historical note, you can wonder what George Bernard Shaw would have understood by the following statements? "My mother was hacked last night." "What a great meal - I'll upload it!" "If anyone's out there, can you inbox me?' "How many steps did you get today?" "Will you torrent me the next series?" "I've given up on windows."

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How technology is changing language and the way we think about the world

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We are getting used to the idea of rapidly developing technologies changing what we can do and how we do things. What most people haven't considered is how technologies affect our language and how these changes are affecting the way we speak and even the way we think.

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Link to McKinnon

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Stephen Pinker in his 2003 book "The Blank Slate" coined the name euphemism treadmill for the process whereby words introduced to replace an offensive word, over time become offensive themselves. A current example of this is mental retardation.

The word itself comes from the Latin retardare meaning "to make slow, delay or hinder".

Retardation was first used in the psychiatric sense in 1895, and eventually replaced older terms - once neutral themselves - like moron, imbecile, idiot, feeble-minded and cretin. Each of these terms had a specific meaning as to severity and age of development (cretinism for example referred to severe congenital hypothyroidism) but these meanings often differed between countries. The new term was subdivided into degrees of mild, moderate and severe mental retardation. These new technical terms were no doubt welcomed by those affected, as the previous names were being used as derogatory insults (as indeed they still are).

By the 1960s when I was in grade school, the same process had occurred with retardation. "Retard" was a common playground insult, as in "Look where yer goin', ya retard!" To us at the time it was considered harmless fun (although I now recognize the potential to really hurt someone who did have an intellectual disability). In Grade 7 my buddy Doug and I did impersonations of "retarded chipmunks" in which we tucked our lower lip inside our upper front teeth and crossed our eyes.

Since that time retardation has been gradually replaced by a variety of more acceptable (at least for now) terms including mentally handicapped, mentally impaired, mentally challenged, intellectually challenged, intellectually disabled, learning disabled, and developmentally disabled. The last two of course are broader terms that include other conditions not covered by the meaning of mental retardation.

The term retardation is also associated in the minds of many with the period of time in which people with intellectual disabilities (the term I will use) were abused, discriminated against and locked away from society. While this is not the fault of the word, a change in terminology will help us put that period of history behind us.

These changes are still taking place. It wasn't until 2006 that the American Association on Mental Retardation changed their name to American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. There is currently a bill before the Saskatchewan Legislature to expunge the "R-word" from provincial government statutes; the passing of Bill 625 will make Saskatchewan the first jurisdiction in to do so.

The trend is to increasingly distance the names from the conditions. The Saskatchewan Council for Crippled Children and Adults, formed in 1950, became, in 1984, the Saskatchewan Abilities Council - a perfect example of looking at the full half of the glass. The Canadian Association for Community Living is an organization dedicated to advancing human rights of people with intellectual disabilities, and is a member of the international organization Inclusion International. These names go even further - focusing on the goal rather than the disabilities (but don't tell you much about them when you come across them in the phone book). Their websites didn't say so, but I suspect these are also recent name changes.

Will these new terms, like intellectually disabled or intellectually challenged, also be deemed offensive at some later date and require yet another euphemistic replacement? Perhaps, following the trend noted in the previous paragraph, "disabilities" will give way to "challenges". But one thing in their favor is they don't lend themselves as readily to insults. I can't quite imagine children taunting each other with "Look where yer goin', ya challenge!"

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The Euphemism Treadmill - replacing the "R-Word"

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Stephen Pinker in his 2003 book "The Blank Slate" coined the name euphemism treadmill for the process whereby words introduced to replace an offensive word, over time become offensive themselves. A current example of this is mental retardation. The word itself comes from the Latin retardare meaning "to make slow, delay or hinder".

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https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_early_modern.html

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Teachers in UK report growing 'vocabulary deficiency'

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Problem exists throughout primary and secondary school, leading to lower self-esteem and negative behaviour

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11 Spelling Changes That Would Make The English Language WAY Easier

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11 Spelling Changes That Would Make The English Language WAY Easier

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2 Billion Voices: How to speak bad English perfectly | Heather Hansen | TEDxOdense

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What your speaking style, like, says about you | Vera Regan | TEDxDublin

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No such thing as correct English | Kellam Barta | TEDxFargo

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How Language Shapes the Way We Think | Lera Boroditsky | TED

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Yowza! 300 new words added to Scrabble dictionary

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Scrabble players will have to rethink their game after new words, including OK and ew, added to approved list

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Macmillan Dictionary's discussion of plain English continues in the New Year, and though we cannot expect a year in which clear and meaningful language entirely replaces vague and convoluted language, it remains something to aim at for those of us concerned with good communication.

In its Golden Bull awards last month, the Plain English Campaign drew attention to an example of what it called "Episcopal legalese":

AND WHEREAS We have consented to the said period being so brought to an end and to the exercise of such right of presentation NOW WE HEREBY DECLARE that the said period shall come to an end on the date hereof ...

It's from a bishop writing to his parishioners, and apparently its meaning is quite straightforward. Hardly anyone writes like this anymore, though, and for good reason. To modern eyes and ears its verbosity borders on indecipherable unless you're accustomed to legal writing or archaic prose.

If the main purpose of language is communication, why does it so easily go awry? In a thought-provoking post about why people use "jargon (bad) as opposed to terminology (good)", Michael Rundell finds that fashion and the desire to convey importance or complexity are significant factors. And styles become habits, regardless of how effective they are.

The ornate style of writing was once in fashion. It combined elaborate syntax with a multitude of rhetorical devices and what became known as "inkhorn terms". An inkhorn is an inkwell made of horn, and inkhorn term is what Michael Quinion calls "a term of gentlemanly abuse" that was applied to fancy words borrowed from classical languages during the gradual shift from Middle to Modern English.

In this period, a great many words were imported from such languages as French, Greek, and especially Latin. A lot of these words were technical or literary, and inevitably there was criticism of the inflated style that some writers adopted in seeming deference to their beloved Latin. In The Story of Language, C. L. Barber writes that in early Modern English "the trickle of Latin loans becomes a river, and by 1600 it is a deluge".

But many Latin and Latinate loans that were attacked as inkhorn terms gradually slipped into the standard vocabulary and are now thoroughly integrated into English: celebrate, frivolous, hereditary, ingenious, reciprocal, relinquish, and strenuous, to name a few. Others failed to catch on: fatigate, furibund, oblatrant, and turgidous.

We can imagine an alternate scenario in which the survivors - celebrate and co. - were the ones that became "exolete" (obsolete), and the inkhorn terms like furibund that now appear strange and amusing lived on in our regular speech. One generation's grotesquery is another's normal expression: there's no predicting the ultimate fate of a lexical borrowing, or any other verbal innovation.

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Macmillan Dictionary's discussion of plain English continues in the New Year, and though we cannot expect a year in which clear and meaningful language entirely replaces vague and convoluted language, it remains something to aim at for those of us concerned with good communication.

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The evolution of spoken English began from the fifth century, with waves of attack and eventual occupation by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. They spoke the same West Germanic tongue but with different dialects. Their intermingling created a new Germanic language; now referred to as Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.

During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings would plunder and settle, bringing with them another version of the same Germanic language, now referred to as Old Norse. The English and Viking amalgamation would become the second step in establishing a spoken English and the basis for the varying English dialects today.

In a new book In a Manner of Speaking - The Story of Spoken English, Charlie Haylock, with the help of illustrations from cartoonist Barrie Appleby, explores the language from the origins of Old English in northern Europe to the abbreviated language of texts used today...

Norman influence

In 1066, the Normans had an eclectic mix of languages: a Frankish influenced northern French dialect; Old Norse from their Viking roots; Flemish from the army supporting William I's wife, Matilda of Flanders; and the Brythonic based language of the mercenary Bretons. The Normans kept the basic structure of the English language, but during the Middle English period they introduced around 10,000 words of their own into the English tongue. Many words were related to officialdom and are evident in the vocabulary surrounding administration, parliament, government, the legal profession and the crown. Many more words filtered down into everyday matters including food production, such as beef, pork, herb, juice and poultry. They introduced words beginning with 'con', 'de', 'dis' and 'en', such as conceal, continue, demand, encounter, disengage and engage.

They also included words ending in 'age' and 'ence' as in advantage, courage, language and commence.

Thomas Elyot, a prolific writer during the English Renaissance, was an advocate for inkhorn words, says Charlie Haylock. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)

The Renaissance

The English Renaissance saw thousands of Greek- and Latin-based words enter the language. This occurred via the Italian Renaissance, and was greatly helped by English poets, authors and playwrights, especially Shakespeare writing many plays centred in Italy including Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

These wordsmiths also made up and created many thousands of new words and the 'Inkhorn Controversy' raged. 'Inkhorn' was the term for an inkwell made out of a small horn and became a nickname for the new words being created by playwrights and poets.

One advocate for inkhorn words was Thomas Elyot, a prolific writer during the English Renaissance. He was well studied in both Latin and Greek, and as such, was able to introduce many new concocted words into the English vocabulary. Those academics and scholars totally against inkhorn words included Thomas Wilson who was not only an academic and scholar, but also as an author, diplomat, judge, privy councilor and Dean of Durham. He is likely best known for two publications, The Rule of Reason, conteinynge the Arte of Logique set forth in Englishe, and his most famous book, The Arte of Rhetorique. He was against the flowery extravagant speech and inkhorns of the English Renaissance and advocated a simpler way of writing, using words derived from Old English rather than from Latin and Greek.

Nevertheless, inkhorn words prevailed and Shakespeare alone made up an estimated 1,750 words and idioms, many of which are household phrases today, but many were discarded.

Many of the phrases we use today were first written by playwright William Shakespeare. (Illustration courtesy of 'In a Manner of Speaking' by Charlie Haylock and Barrie Appleby)

Overseas imports

Elizabethan exploration, privateering and piracy was another source for English vocabulary, mainly from the Spanish and Portuguese, including many Caribbean and Native American words they had adopted such as 'tobacco' and 'potato'. Words were also adopted directly into English from Native Americans and the Caribbean such as 'canoe', and 'hammock'.

Stuart colonialism on the eastern shores of America saw a great number of words from Native Americans being adopted and entering the English language direct. The Pilgrim Fathers and subsequent English settlements adopted even more.

The British Empire at its height encompassed one quarter of the Earth's land mass, and controlled hundreds of millions of different peoples throughout the world. The English language would be greatly affected, with words being adopted into the vocabulary. Numerous words from India alone have become common in English today, such as 'pyjamas', 'khaki', 'bungalow', jodhpurs', 'juggernaut', 'curry', 'chutney', 'shampoo' and 'thug' to name but only a few.

Britain's share in world trade saw a steady rise during the Tudor and Stuarts' exploration policies through to the Victorian Empire building. This increase in trade would see another wave of new words entering the English vocabulary from foreign climes, including words from The Netherlands such as: 'landscape'; 'scone'; 'booze'; 'schooner'; 'skipper'; 'avast'; 'knapsack'; 'easel'; 'sketch' and a great deal more.

The American influence

American influence on English has been profound. American literature became more popular in England, as did films with the advent of the movies and Hollywood, along with songs, music and dance and many American programmes on television. The USA were also allies of Britain in two world wars and still use British-based USAF airfields.

All these factors together with the age of the computer, means that even more Americanisms and phrases have been adopted into the English vocabulary.

One example is the phrase 'stiff upper lip'. It's believed that this originated as the Americans saw the English aristocracy speaking with a strict 'standard English', which necessitated an immobile upper lip to pronounce it, no matter what the circumstances.

Other examples of American-influenced phrases include: no axe to grind; sitting on the fence; poker face; stake a claim; and words such as: bedrock; smooch; raincoat; skyscraper; joyride; showdown; cocktail and cookie.

The evolution continues...

The English language has never had an official standard. It has evolved through the centuries and adopted many thousands of words through overseas exploration, international trade, and the building of an empire. It has progressed from very humble beginnings as a dialect of Germanic settlers in the 5th century, to a global language in the 21st century. It is a rich language with tens of thousands more words in its vocabulary than any other language and as Maria Legg writes in her foreword to In a Manner of Speaking: "Indeed, a history of the language must necessarily be a history of its people too".
Charlie Haylock is the author of In a Manner of Speaking - The Story of Spoken English (Amberley Books 2017), which is illustrated by cartoonist Barrie Appleby

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From the 'green-eyed monster' to 'a stiff upper lip': the evolution of the English language

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Throughout history, thousands of words have been adopted from around the world into the English vocabulary. Writing for History Extra, Charlie Haylock takes us on a tour of the historical origins of many of the words and phrases we still use today...

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Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its vitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile. - Elizabeth Drew (1887-1965)

Language is a dynamic phenomenon which accurately reflects contemporary society. The English lexicon has mutated over time from a variety of parent languages, primarily Latin, French and Old English, which originally derive from the prehistoric Proto-Indo-European. Though certain core words hark back to the fundamental origins of the language, and remain more or less consistent, over time many new words have been added - a direct reflection of the preoccupations of a society at any particular time in history. These new words, around 3000 in each language annually, are called neologisms.

A neologism (from Greek néo-, meaning 'new' and logos, meaning 'speech, utterance') is a new term which has entered common use, but has not yet been fully accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms appear due to developments in social life, culture or science, and are usually directly attributable to their specific era. In his paper 'Explorations in translational creativity: Strategies for interpreting neologisms', Helge Niska defines neologisms as ' tokens of a creative process ...growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life on the other'. Some new words are closely tied to temporary phenomena, and fade into insignificance, while others, related to enduring aspects of society, remain, and become permanent features of our lexicon.

Before the establishment of widespread cheap print, the evolution of language through the appearance of neologisms was much more difficult to track. Some dictionaries were only revised every forty years, meaning that vital changes in language, particularly those ephemeral, were missed. Today, dictionaries update their corpora at least once a year, and online dictionaries represent huge linguistic databases, often allowing users to contribute terms and definitions to reflect the way language is used.

Those interested in the upkeep of the English linguistic hoard can look forward to the annual unveiling of the 'word of the year' list published by the Collins dictionary. Last year's batch of neologisms saw such linguistic gems as 'Corbynomics', aka 'the economic policies advocated by the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn', and 'dadbod', defined as 'an untoned and slightly plump male physique'. But where do these new words come from, and how do they come to be accepted?

Neologisms pass through three stages: creation, trial and establishment. The new term enters common language as a ' protologism', which is used only by a limited audience. It is then diffused, until finally it becomes widely accepted and stabilised - a stability which is indicated by its appearance in glossaries, dictionaries and large corpora. When it comes to their origin - as with the above example, where Corbyn and economics, or dad and body are fused together - neologisms are often a blend of existing linguistic fragments, which are used to coin a new term.

In fact, very few of the new words which appear in the English language are completely 'new' - they account for less than 1% of all English neologisms. The vast majority of new words and expressions include at least one lexical component which is already familiar to us. They are formed through several linguistic processes, such as compounding: where existing words are combined ( speed-dating, text messages), blending: where parts of existing words are fused together ( brunch - breakfast and lunch, flexiterian - flexible vegetarian), re-appropriation (with new senses for words such as mouse, virus, surf, web), abbreviation ( DVD - Digital Video Disk, IM - Instant Messaging, but also colloquial usage as in LOL - laugh out loud, or BTW - by the way) or affixation: where recognised affixes are creatively attached to give rise to new concepts (such as regift - to give something as a gift which you originally received as a gift yourself, or deshopper - describing a person who buys something, uses it, but then returns it to the shop for a full refund). Perhaps the simplest of all linguistic processes used to create new words, is that of borrowing, where words from other languages enter common use. Borrowing has been a feature of English vocabulary development for centuries, with words such as shampoo (from the Hindi word c mpo, meaning 'massage') or latte, an espresso coffee with frothy steamed milk (from the Italian word for milk), now completely indistinguishable from their 'original' English counterparts.

Yet, more than three-quarters of the words proudly added to the language in 2016 will be forgotten a decade hence. So how do some neologisms manage to 'stick', while others disappear into linguistic nothingness, a mere nostalgia of concepts, people and events gone by? The key to survival for all these new words is usage. With the advent of the internet, language has a much bigger platform for usage and propagation than ever before, giving it the potential to expand at a previously unobservable rate. Yet real longevity depends on more, it is linked to the existence of the concept which these neologisms represent. Today we google information and like posts on Facebook, but it remains to be seen whether these words will survive the test of time in the ever-evolving world of technology. For, after all, neologisms are words that appear from nowhere, exert their significance in a bid to become accepted, and exist for just as long as the people using them find them relevant. It is this which ensures the ongoing fertility of our linguistic soil.
Written by Iweta Kalinowska
Further reading: Communication Trainee at TermCoord
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Neologisms - their origin and how they reinvigorate language

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Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its vitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile. - Elizabeth Drew (1887-1965) Language is a dynamic phenomenon which accurately reflects contemporary society.

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On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: "Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English ... This is America." A video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a "fiesta" protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.

As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. It's a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt's 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that "we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse".

As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective,it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent's dream and a student's misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English - he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes - published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include "last-minute", "fitness", "group sex", and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.

In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own - to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: "Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy's diktat, are going to trade out 'sexting' for texto pornographique?") Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.

The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode - whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German - have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.

Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world's knowledge and all the world's places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland.

ntil recently, the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread through a combination of conquest, trade and colonisation. (Some languages, such as Arabic and Sanskrit, also caught on through their status as sacred tongues.) But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millenium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a "lingua franca" or "global language" truly captures. It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a "hypercentral" one.

De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the "peripheral languages", which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the "central languages", though a more apt term might be "national languages". These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.

Following these are the 12 "supercentral languages": Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili - each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation's colonial past.

Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls "the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together". The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a "universal language" . For Mizumura, what makes it universal is not that it has many native speakers - Mandarin and Spanish have more - but that it is "used by the greatest number of non-native speakers in the world". She compares it to a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency. The literary critic Jonathan Arac is even more blunt, noting, in a critique of what he calls "Anglo-Globalism", that "English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global."

In the last few decades, as globalisation has accelerated and the US has remained the world's most powerful country, the advance of English has taken on a new momentum. In 2008, Rwanda switched its education system from French to English, having already made English an official language in 14 years earlier. Officially, this was part of the government's effort to make Rwanda the tech hub of Africa. Unofficially, it's widely believed to be an expression of disgust at France's role in propping-up the pre-1994 Hutu-dominant government, as well as a reflection that the country's ruling elite mostly speaks English, having grown up as exiles in anglophone east Africa. When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it made English its official language despite having very few resources or qualified personnel with which to teach it in schools. The Minister of higher education at the time justified the move as being aimed at making the country "different and modern", while the news director of South Sudan Radio added that with English, South Sudan could "become one nation" and "communicate with the rest of the world" - understandable goals in a country home to more than 50 local languages.

The situation in east Asia is no less dramatic. China currently has more speakers of English as a second language than any other country. Some prominent English teachers have become celebrities, conducting mass lessons in stadiums seating thousands. In South Korea, meanwhile, according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung-Yul Park, English is a "national religion". Korean employers expect proficiency in English, even in positions where it offers no obvious advantage.

The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung or "English frenzy". Although mostly confined to a mania for instruction and immersion, occasionally this "frenzy" spills over into medical intervention. As Sung-Yul Park relates: "An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue ... Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans."

There is no evidence to suggest that this surgery in any way improves English pronunciation. The willingness to engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me, though, as a potent metaphor for English's peculiar status in the modern world. It is no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks, as it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission for Air Navigation. It is now seen as the access code to the global elite. If you want your children to get ahead, then they better have English in their toolkit.

s the conquest of English really so bad? In the not-too-distant future, thanks to English, the curse of Babel will be undone and the children of men may come together once again, united with the aid of a common tongue. Certainly, that's what English's boosters would have you believe. After all, what a work is English, how copious in its vocabulary, how noble in expression, how sinuous in its constructions, and yet how plain in its basic principles. A language, in short, with a word for almost everything, capable of an infinite gradation of meanings, equally suited to describing the essential rights of mankind as to ornamenting a packet of crisps, whose only defect, as far as I know, is that it makes everyone who speaks it sound like a duck.

Well, not really. (OK, maybe a little - English, while not an ugly language, isn't exactly pretty either). Mostly, I'm speaking out of bitterness - one that is old, and until recently, lay dormant. My first language was Polish. I learned it from my parents at home. English followed shortly, at school in Pennsylvania. I learned to speak it fluently, but with an accent, which took years of teasing - and some speech therapy, kindly provided by the state - to wear away. That, combined with the experience of watching the widespread condescension towards those who take their time learning English, left me a lifelong English-sceptic. (I admit, also, that a strain of linguistic megalomania runs through many Polish speakers, one best summed up by the novelist Joseph Conrad, who, when asked why he didn't write in his native language, replied: "I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient.")

It's not that English is bad. It's fine! A perfectly nice language, capable of expressing a great many things - and with scores of fascinating regional variants, from Scots to Singapore English. But it is so prevalent. And so hard to escape. And so freighted with buffoonish puffery written on its behalf: "our magnificent bastard tongue"; "the language that connects the world". Please. There is no reason for any particular language to be worshipped around the world like a golden idol. There is a pervasive mismatch between the grand claims made on English's behalf, and its limitations as means of communication (limitations, to be fair, that it shares with all other languages).

Is English oppressive? When its pervasive influence silences other languages, or discourages parents from passing on their native languages to their children, I think it can be. When you do know another language, it's merely constricting, like wearing trousers that are too tight. That's because while English is good for a great many things, it is not good for everything. To me, family intimacies long to be expressed in Polish. So does anything concerning the seasons, forest products and catastrophic sorrows. Poetry naturally sounds better in Polish. I've always spoken it to cats and dogs on the assumption that they understand, being simultaneously convinced that raccoons and lesser animals only respond to shouts.

This isn't quite as idiosyncratic as it sounds. Aneta Pavlenko, an applied linguist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who has spent her career studying the psychology of bilingual and multilingual speakers, has found that speakers of multiple languages frequently believe that each language conveys a "different self". Languages, according to her respondents, come in a kaleidoscopic range of emotional tones. "I would inevitably talk to babies and animals in Welsh," reports a Welsh-speaker. An informant from Finland counters: "Finnish emotions are rarely stated explicitly. Therefore it is easier to tell my children that I love them in English." Several Japanese speakers say that it's easier to express anger in English, especially by swearing.

Intuitive though it might be to some, the idea that different languages capture and construct different realities has been a subject of academic controversy for at least 200 years. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was among the first to articulate it in a complex form. After studying Amerindian languages in the New World, he came to the conclusion that every language "draws a circle" around its speakers, creating a distinct worldview through its grammar as well as in its vocabulary. In the 20th century, the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated this idea into a broader vision of how language structures thought. Both drew inspiration for their work from their study of North American languages such as Nootka, Shawnee and Hopi.

This idea - now usually known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - has had a checkered history in academia. At different times, it has been hailed by it proponents as foundational insight for modern anthropology and literary theory, and blamed by its detractors as the source of the worst excesses of postmodern philosophy. In recent decades, sociolinguists have arrived at a few startlingly suggestive findings concerning the influence of language on colour perception, orientation and verbs of motion - but in general, the more expansive notion that different languages inculcate fundamentally different ways of thinking has not been proven.

Nonetheless, some version of this idea continues to find supporters, not least among writers familiar with shifting between languages. Here is the memoirist Eva Hoffman on the experience of learning English in Vancouver while simultaneously feeling cut off from the Polish she had grown up speaking as a teenager in Kraków: "This radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colours, striations, nuances - its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection." The Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo described something similar in her recent memoir, writing about how uncomfortable she felt, at first, with the way the English language encouraged speakers to use the first-person singular, rather than plural. "After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? ... But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular - urgently."

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Li Yang teaches students his 'Crazy English' accelerated learning method in Nanjing, China. Photograph: China Photos/Getty Images

In the 1970s, Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish academia, stood the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on its head. Instead of trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter-gatherers, she turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones. For Wierzbicka, English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other language. It's just that in an anglophone world, that invisible baggage is harder to discern. In a series of books culminating in 2013's evocatively named Imprisoned in English, she has attempted to analyse various assumptions - social, spatial, emotional and otherwise - latent in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK.

Reading Wierzbicka's work is like peeking through a magic mirror that inverts the old "how natives think" school of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves. Her English-speakers are a pragmatic people, cautious in their pronouncements and prone to downplaying their emotions. They endlessly qualify their remarks according to their stance towards what is being said. Hence their endless use of expressions such as "I think", "I believe", "I suppose", "I understand", "I suspect". They prefer fact over theories, savour "control" and "space", and cherish autonomy over intimacy. Their moral lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture-specific concepts called "right" and "wrong", which they mysteriously believe to be universal.

Wierzbicka's description of English's subconscious system of values hardly holds true for the billion or more speakers of this most global of tongues. But it is also a reminder that, despite its influence, English is not truly universal. Its horizons are just as limited as those of any other language, whether Chinese or Hopi or Dalabon.

For if language connects people socially, it also connects them to a place. The linguist Nicholas Evans has described how Kayardild, a language spoken in northern Australia, requires a speaker to continually orient themselves according to the cardinal directions. Where an English speaker would orient things according to their own perception - my left, my right, my front, my back - a speaker of Kayardild thinks in terms of north, south, east and west. As a consequence, speakers of Kayardild (and those of several other languages that share this feature) possess "absolute reckoning", or a kind of "perfect pitch" for direction. It also means removing one's self as the main reference point for thinking about space. As Evans writes of his own experiences learning the language, "one aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild grammar literally puts everyone in their place."

Kayardild and its kin are truly local languages, with few speakers, and modes of expression that are hard to separate from the places in which they are spoken. But that should not lead us to think that they are lesser. The world is made up of places, not universals. To speak only English, in spite of its vast vocabulary and countless varieties, is still to dwell in a rather small pool. It draws the same circle Humboldt described around its speakers as each of the other 6,000 human languages. The difference is that we have mistaken that circle for the world.

ecause English is increasingly the currency of the universal, it is difficult to express any opposition to its hegemony that doesn't appear to be tainted by either nationalism or snobbery. When Minae Mizumura published the Fall of Language in the Age of English, in 2008, it was a surprise commercial success in Japan. But it provoked a storm of criticism, as Mizumura was accused of elitism, nationalism and being a "hopeless reactionary". One representative online comment read: "Who does she think she is, a privileged bilingual preaching to the rest of us Japanese!" (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mizumura's broader argument, about the gradual erosion of Japanese literature - and especially, the legacy of the Japanese modernist novel - got lost in the scuffle.)

Those of us troubled by the hyperdominance of English should also remember the role it has played in some societies - especially multi-ethnic ones - as a bridge to the wider world and counterweight to other nationalisms. This was especially keenly felt in South Africa, where Afrikaans was widely associated with the policy of apartheid. When the government announced that Afrikaans would be used as a language of instruction in schools on par with English in 1974, the decision led in 1976 to a mass demonstration by black students known as the Soweto uprising. Its brutal suppression resulted in hundreds of deaths, and is considered a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle. Similar protests have periodically racked southern India since the 1940s over attempts to enforce official use of Hindi in place of English.

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A sign for English lessons in Nawalgarh, Rajasthan, India. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

In other parts of the world though, English still carries the full weight of its colonialist past. Since the 1960s, the celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has advocated on behalf of African languages and against the prevalence of English-language education in postcolonial countries. In his landmark 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, he describes the corrosive effect of English language instruction, comparing it to a form of "spiritual subjugation". Colonial education, in which pupils were physically punished for speaking their native languages while at school (something also done to the Welsh into the early 20th century) was necessarily, and deliberately, alienating, "like separating the mind from the body".

Since publishing Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ has worked to put its dictates into practice. He renounced his baptismal name, James, and with it Christianity, and ceased to write fiction in English. Since the 1980s, he has written all his novels and plays in his native Gikuyu, only using English (and occasionally Kiswahili) for essays and polemics. This last decision is one that many people still question. As he said in a recent interview: "If I meet an English person, and he says, 'I write in English,' I don't ask him, 'Why are you writing in English?' If I meet a French writer, I don't ask him, 'Why don't you write in Vietnamese?' But I am asked over and over again, 'Why do you write in Gikuyu?' For Africans, the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African language."

Part of the paradox of Ngũgĩ's situation is that while he may be the world's foremost advocate for writing literature in African languages, his novels have won acclaim and gained international recognition through the medium of English. The hegemony of English is now such that, in order to be recognised, any opposition to English has to formulated in English in order to be heard.

oday it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks. Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world's 6,000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century. For even a fraction of these to survive, we're going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth learning.

In most of the world, it's already too late. In California, where I live, most of the languages that were spoken before the arrival of Europeans are already extinct. On America's eastern seaboard, thanks to long proximity to Anglo settlers, the situation is even worse. Most of what we know about many of these vanished languages comes in the form of brief word lists compiled by European settlers and traders before the 19th century. Stadaconan (or Laurentian) survives only from a glossary of 220 words jotted down by Jacques Cartier w

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Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

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On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: "Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English ...

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For the first time ever, the No 1 album in America features lyrics sung mostly in Korean. Love Yourself: Tear by K-pop group BTS has been in a fierce chart battle with Post Malone this week, but has managed to clinch the No 1 spot, outperforming industry predictions.

The record's success comes at a time of huge opportunity in the US music industry for acts that don't perform in English.

In the 16 years between the summer of the Macarena in 1996 and the viral success of Psy's Gangnam Style in 2012, there wasn't a single song performed in a language other than English to hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100.

In the past three years though, the proportion of non-English tracks on Billboard has been increasing. This has, in large part, been down to the success of reggaeton artists and, in particular, Despacito, the Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi hit that had a 16-week record-breaking reign at No 1 last summer. Despacito opened the door for other latin tracks. In 2016, the year before its release, there were just four Spanish-language tracks in the top 100 all year. In 2017, there were 19.

The number is almost certainly set to rise this year. This week's Billboard 100 features six non-English songs including Fake Love by BTS - sung in Korean - and Te Bote, Dura, X and Dame Tu Cosita - reggaeton tracks all performed in Spanish.

After the success of Despacito, Luis Fonsi had said he was sent videos from all over the world of "people trying to nail the Spanish, trying to learn a bit of Spanish through the song". Spanish has long been the most commonly learned language in the US, but the influence of K-pop is being felt in the languages young Americans are learning. Between 2013 and 2016, as K-pop grew dramatically in popularity in America, US college enrolments in Korean classes went up 65%, even as overall enrolments in foreign language courses dropped off.

Priscilla Kim is the director of the Korean Cultural Center in New York, which offers language courses. She says that, among younger students, K-pop has become a driving factor to learn the language. "Over the years we have definitely witnessed growing popularity of K-pop among younger students. As a Korean language and cultural institution located in the heart of K-town, we have courses in the summer that are tailored toward K-pop fans who are interested in learning Korean through K-pop lyrics."

The language app Duolingo launched a Korean course in September 2017 and it currently has 2.78 million total learners. On message boards on the site, users have talked about being inspired by K-pop acts as well as Korean TV to learn Korean, and the app has included some lessons that are based around K-pop.

The vast majority of songs and albums streamed in the US are still performed in English, but the rapid chart surge for non-English music in the past few years suggests this may just be the beginning.

At a time where some Americans are concerned that speaking other languages in public puts themselves in danger, pop music feels like a progressive antidote, with the importance of what language a song is performed in second to the music itself.
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English is no longer the default language of American pop

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For the first time ever, the No 1 album in America features lyrics sung mostly in Korean. Love Yourself: Tear by K-pop group BTS has been in a fierce chart battle with Post Malone this week, but has managed to clinch the No 1 spot, outperforming industry predictions.

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People sure get mad about words. Every month for a few years now I've been a "grammar enthusiast" guest on ABC Radio Melbourne. We do talkback and people call in with their grammar-related comments. Sometimes they ask questions. Last month Chris from Northcote, aged 10, wanted to know whether he should write "Chris' cricket bat" or "Chris's cricket bat", but mostly the segment is an airing of grievances. A catharsis. A blood-letting. It is public therapy and I'm pleased to be part of it.

But often I feel I'm not the adviser they're looking for. People want me to bang the grammar gavel and solemnly rule that "irregardless" is not a word, and that it's wrong to say your team is "versing" another team, and that sports commentators who start sentences with "for mine" must be driven from our towns and cities. (There are lots of complaints about sports commentary.)

So really it's a segment about language change. And I love language change! Thus, I disappoint the listeners. Change is the thing they revile.

"Some Method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever," wrote Jonathan Swift in 1712. His instinct was to preserve. But languages evolve - like viruses. English has been a very successful virus, now spoken by 1.5 billion earthlings thanks to its wily shape shifting. And these days, our human desire to somehow fix the language in place is being thwarted at a faster pace than ever.

"The internet has REVOLUTIONISED language change," enthuses former AP Stylebook editor David Minthorn, in one of the most gloriously nerdy videos on YouTube. A few weeks ago, Dictionary of Slang author Jonathon Green gleefully tweeted: "... the lexicographer's challenge was always: 'where do we find our data'. Now it's where do we dare allow ourselves to stop looking. Because there is always more on offer."

Jonathon Green (@MisterSlang)
Further to the @andydickson @guardian @OED piece, the (slang) lexicographer's challenge was always: 'where do we find our data'. Now it's where do we dare allow ourselves to stop looking. Because there is always more on offer.

Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace. So I have compiled a list of changes for which to watch out in 2018.

1. Semantic change thanks to the internet

Trolls are not just bridge dwellers anymore, a cloud isn't always a visible mass of condensed watery vapour and a mouse is sometimes a mouse. Computers have given us so much. But mainly they have given us the internet, where we can wake to a new definition of woke. Definition expansions happen when usages spread from small language communities to larger ones. "Spread" being the key word because, as we know, "fetch" never happened.

My colleague recently tweeted to apologise that her posts were "so thirsty tonight". The next day I asked what "thirsty" meant and I have never felt so old. She did, in fact, act quite extra about it. I'm usually the goat at knowing words so I was salty. And her outfit was snatched, which made things worse. The whole thing was not lit and I have receipts.

2. Syntactical change thanks to the internet

I am tired because life. I am angry because the internet. "Because" is a preposition now! Ewww. But also I love it. If I were a 2014 Facebook user, I'd comment: "This." Because "this", as a demonstrative pronoun, can be useful in place of an approving clause or exclamation. Those who use the "This" sentence, though, are a dying breed. So if you haven't started on that, skip straight to an emoji for your emphatic enjoiner.☝️

3. Semantic and syntactical change thanks to television

Is this a thing? Yes it is. In fact "a thing" is a thing, thanks to television show The West Wing. And another thing is "re-gifting", a verb birthed from a noun by Seinfeld's Elaine Benes. Annoyed much? Hardly anyone stuck the terminal adverb "much" on things before Buffy did. These changes are old news in 2018, though. I think television might be losing its edge.

4. Inflection change led by Kanye West

"Real rappers is hard to find." If anyone can eliminate verb modification from English, it's Kanye. About time!

5. Conversion thanks to advertising

In grammar, "conversion" refers to a word's shift into a different role or part of speech. It's what happened when Facebook converted "friend" from a noun into a verb (and gave us the vital new infinitive "to unfriend") and when corporate memos did the same thing to "action". These changes were actioned a while ago, however. The new thing is turning adjectives into nouns. Use Nutella and you're "spreading the happy"; shop at Sephora and you're "celebrating your extraordinary"; connect to the internet with AT&T and you're "rethinking possible". If you cannot keep up, La Trobe University will help you to "find your clever".

6. Word and phrase coinages from the internet meme factory

New words! New phrases! Sure, they're annoying, but if they're useful, they stick.

One of them stuck hard late last year when the Macquarie Dictionary named "milkshake duck" its word of the year. Noun: a person who is initially viewed positively by the media but is then discovered to have something questionable about them that causes a sharp decline in their popularity. The term was coined in 2016 by Australian Twitter user Ben Ward, aka @pixelatedboat: "The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist."

pixelated boat [ASMR] binaural ~4 hours~ (@pixelatedboat)
The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

Twitter seems to invent words faster than any other social media platform. Not that they all catch on. In 2015 I cheered for brave user @murrman5 and his new noun: "'I came downstairs for a zip of juice and noticed the TV was gone so I called you guys' [cop stops writing] did you say zip of juice?" Retweets: 3,293, but I haven't heard a peep about "zip" since. For a brief moment, though, to use a phrase coined last month by the Victorian roads minister, Luke Donnellan, it was " better than a kick in the dick ".

7. Punctuation change led by smartphones

If you've ever typed "apple" into your phone and been autocorrected to "Apple", you'll know that small-screen communication is causing George Orwell to spin like a beachball in his grave. But punctuation seems to be the real victim of our incessant texting.

A small storm blew up in 2016 when senior grammarian David Crystal observed a change in the character of the full stop. He put forward, at a British writers festival, that in text messages the full stop has ceased to be a humble and simple ender of sentences. Instead, it now turns what might otherwise be a friendly "Fine!" into a passive-aggressive "Fine." Interviewed afterwards, Crystal explained: "It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it. It's like when you say, 'I am not going - period.' It's a mark. It can be aggressive. It can be emphatic. It can mean, 'I have no more to say'."

Is texting putting the full stop out to pasture? In its report on the incident, the New York Times included not a single full stop - and truth be told I didn't notice [And did you notice the absence of one here?]

8. 'Meaning leakage' thanks to politicians, bureaucrats and business writers

There's a dark side to hating change. Self-appointed language gatekeepers are often attempting to enforce a central English. This sort of intransigent rule-booking reaches its stinky nadir in the refusal to accept a word's semantic shift into slur-dom (as in "fag") or a word's reclamation by the slurred themselves (as in "queer"). It's grammatically blinkered and, I feel, a failure of the human spirit.

But some gatekeeping comes from a generous place, the place where words are valued for their meaning-carrying powers. These grievers rage against the kind of language change that allows people to communicate less. To obscure truth, as Don Watson would say, in a weaselly way.

In US political reporting we now have "alt right", a term that paints a benign sheen over a white nationalist branch of conservatism. In its topical guide for the 2016 election, AP Stylebook ruled alt right "a public-relations device to make its supporters' actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience".

In bureaucracy, we have people noun-ifying verbs to distance themselves from any clear action: "Consideration will be given by the committee to the provision of advice on this policy issue in the near future." (The advising is in there somewhere, but it's a long way from the main verb.)

In business, as ever, we have people making things up to sound, as they might say, "leading-edge". Projects are "moving forward" and "synergistic", and people are "unpacking" "the takeaway".

But let's take this offline. The real intention of such jargon is to make others feel like lesser human assets. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve this year, definitely keep an eye out for "coopertition", "change agent", "de-skilling" and "invitation to leave (ITL)". Or gouge your eyes out. Either way, some grievances deserve to be aired.

* Penny's Melbourne-based writing school The Good Copy is holding Word Alert!, a festival of crossword spelling and grammar at the NGV's Melbourne Art Book Fair on 16, 17 and 18 March
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Grammar gripes: why do we love to complain about language?

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People sure get mad about words. Every month for a few years now I've been a "grammar enthusiast" guest on ABC Radio Melbourne. We do talkback and people call in with their grammar-related comments. Sometimes they ask questions.

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In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could "mansplain" a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. "It's been deleted since, but we caught it," Paton told me, with quiet satisfaction.

In her office at Oxford University Press, Paton was drafting a brand new entry for the Oxford English Dictionary. Also in her in-tray when I visited were the millennial-tinged usage of "snowflake", which she had hunted down to a Christian text from 1983 ("You are a snowflake. There are no two of you alike"), and new shadings of the compound "self-made woman". Around 30,000 such items are on the OED master list; another 7,000 more pile up annually. "Everyone thinks we're very slow, but it's actually rather fast," Paton said. "Though admittedly a colleague did spend a year revising 'go'".

Spending 12 months tracing the history of a two-letter word seems dangerously close to folly. But the purpose of a historical dictionary such as the OED is to give such questions the solemnity they deserve. An Oxford lexicographer might need to snoop on Twitter spats from a decade ago; or they might have to piece together a painstaking biography of one of the oldest verbs in the language (the revised entry for "go" traces 537 separate senses over 1,000 years). "Well, we have to get things right," the dictionary's current chief editor, Michael Proffitt, told me.

At one level, few things are simpler than a dictionary: a list of the words people use or have used, with an explanation of what those words mean, or have meant. At the level that matters, though - the level that lexicographers fret and obsess about - few things could be more complex. Who used those words, where and when? How do you know? Which words do you include, and on what basis? How do you tease apart this sense from that? And what is "English" anyway?

In the case of a dictionary such as the OED - which claims to provide a "definitive" record of every single word in the language from 1000AD to the present day - the question is even larger: can a living language be comprehensively mapped, surveyed and described? Speaking to lexicographers makes one wary of using the word "literally", but a definitive dictionary is, literally, impossible. No sooner have you reached the summit of the mountain than it has expanded another hundred feet. Then you realise it's not even one mountain, but an interlocking series of ranges marching across the Earth. (In the age of "global English", the metaphor seems apt.)

Even so, the quest to capture "the meaning of everything" - as the writer Simon Winchester described it in his book on the history of the OED - has absorbed generations of lexicographers, from the Victorian worthies who set up a "Committee to collect unregistered words in English" to the OED's first proper editor, the indefatigable James Murray, who spent 36 years shepherding the first edition towards publication (before it killed him). The dream of the perfect dictionary goes back to the Enlightenment notion that by classifying and regulating language one could - just perhaps - distil the essence of human thought. In 1747, in his "Plan" for the English dictionary that he was about to commence, Samuel Johnson declared he would create nothing less than "a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened". English would not be merely listed in alphabetical order; it would be saved for eternity.

Ninety years after the first edition appeared, the OED - a distant, far bulkier descendant of Johnson's Dictionary - is currently embarked on a third edition, a goliath project that involves overhauling every entry (many of which have not been touched since the late-Victorian era) and adding at least some of those 30,000 missing words, as well as making the dictionary into a fully digital resource. This was originally meant to be completed in 2000, then 2005, then 2010. Since then, OUP has quietly dropped mentions of a date. How far had they got, I asked Proffitt. "About 48%," he replied.

The dictionary retains a quiet pride in the lexical lengths to which it will - indeed, must - go. Some time in the late 1980s, Proffitt's predecessor as chief editor, John Simpson, asked the poet Benjamin Zephaniah about the origins of the noun "skanking". Zephaniah decided that the only way to explain was to come to OED headquarters and do a private, one-on-one performance. Skanking duly went in, defined as "a style of West Indian dancing to reggae music, in which the body bends forward at the waist, and the knees are raised and the hands claw the air in time to the beat".

The tale touches something profound: in capturing a word, a sliver of lived experience can be observed and defined. If only you were able to catch all the words, perhaps you could define existence.

he first English dictionary-makers had no fantasies about capturing an entire culture. In contrast to languages such as Chinese and ancient Greek, where systematic, dictionary-like works have existed for millennia, the earliest English lexicons didn't begin to be assembled until the 16th century. They were piecemeal affairs, as befitted the language's mongrel inheritance - a jumbled stew of old Anglo-Germanic, Norse, Latin and Greek, and Norman French.

The language was perplexing enough, but in the mid-1500s it was getting ever more confusing, as political upheavals and colonial trade brought fresh waves of immigration, and with it a babel of recently "Englished" vocabulary: words such as "alcohol" (Arabic via Latin, c1543) and "abandonment" (French, c1593). Scientific and medical developments added to the chaos. In 1582, the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster issued a frantic plea for someone to "gather all the wordes which we use in our English tung ... into one dictionarie". Such a book would stabilise spelling, a source of violent disagreement. Also, there would finally be rules for "proper use".

In 1604, a clergyman named Robert Cawdrey attempted a stopgap solution: a slender book entitled A Table Alphabeticall. Aimed at "Ladies, gentlewomen and other unskillful persons", it listed approximately 2,500 "hard usuall words", less than 5% of the lexis in use at the time. Definitions were vague - "diet" is described as "manner of foode" - and there were no illustrative quotations, still less any attempt at etymology. A Table Alphabeticall was so far from being completist that there weren't even entries for the letter W.

Lexicographers kept trying to do better - and mostly kept failing. A new "word book" edited by John Bullokar appeared in 1616 (5,000 words); another by Henry Cockeram in 1623 (8,000 words and the first to call itself a "dictionary"); yet another by Thomas Blount in 1656 (11,000 words). But no one could seem to capture "all the wordes" in English, still less agree on what those words meant. The language was expanding more rapidly than ever. Where would you even start?

Comprehensive dictionaries had already been produced in French, Italian and Spanish; Britain's failure to get its house in order was becoming an international embarrassment. In 1664, the Royal Society formed a 22-person committee for "improving the English language", only to disband after a few meetings. In 1712, Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet on the subject, pouring scorn on sloppy usage and insisting that "some Method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever" - arguing that English should not merely be exhaustively surveyed, but that its users should be forced to obey some rules. This task defeated everyone, too. It wasn't until 1746, when a consortium of publishers managed to convince Samuel Johnson to take on this "great and arduous post", that it seemed remotely likely to be completed.

Johnson's Dictionary, eventually finished in 1755, was a heroic achievement. He corralled 43,500-odd words - perhaps 80% of the language in use at the time. But in some eyes, not least the editor's, the book was also a heroic failure. In contrast to the jaunty Enlightenment optimism of his 1747 Plan, with its talk of "fixing" and "preservation", the preface to the published Dictionary is a work of chastened realism. Johnson explains that the idea of taming a fast-evolving creature such as the English language is not only impossible, but risible:

"We laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay."

Much as lexicographers might fantasise about capturing and fixing meaning - as Johnson had once fantasised - a living language will always outrun them.

till, the dream lingered. What if one could get to 100% - lassoing the whole of English, from the beginning of written time to the present day? Numerous revisions or rivals to Johnson were proposed, though few were actually created. After a Connecticut schoolteacher named Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 (70,000 entries), British pride was once again at stake.

In November 1857, the members of the London Philological Society convened to hear a paper by Richard Chenevix Trench, the dean of Westminster, entitled "On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries". It was a bombshell: Trench argued that British word banks were so unreliable that the slate needed to be wiped clean. In their place, he outlined "a true idea of a Dictionary". This Platonic resource should be compiled on scholarly historical lines, mining deep into the caverns of the language for ancient etymology. It should describe rather than prescribe, casting an impartial eye on everything from Anglo-Saxon monosyllables to the latest technical jargon (though Trench drew the line at regional dialect). Most of all, it should be comprehensive, honouring what Trench called - glancing jealously at Germany, where the brothers Grimm had recently started work on a Deutsches Wörterbuch - "our native tongue".

The quest to capture the language in its entirety may have been centuries old, but, like a great railway line or bridge, this new dictionary would be thoroughly Victorian: scientific, audacious, epic and hugely expensive. Building it was a patriotic duty, Trench insisted: "A dictionary is a historical monument, the history of a nation".

For the first two decades, the New English Dictionary, as it was called, looked as if it would go the way of so many previous projects. The first editor died a year in, leaving chaos in his wake. The second had more energy for young women, socialism, folksong and cycling. Only after it was taken over by Oxford University Press, who in 1879 were persuaded to appoint a little-known Scottish schoolteacher and philologist called James Murray as chief editor, did things begin to move.

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James Murray and his staff compiling the first edition of the New English Dictionary, published in 1928. Photograph: Alamy

Murray's masterstroke was to put out an "appeal" in newspapers and library books for volunteer readers to search for quotations, which would illustrate the ways words changed over time - a "corpus" of data that would make the dictionary as accurate as possible. More than 2,000 enthusiasts from across the world and all walks of life assembled some 5m quotations to feed Murray's team of lexicographers as they churned through the alphabet, defining words as they went. Even when it became evident that it would all take far, far longer than scheduled - after five years they were still halfway through the letter A - Murray kept the dictionary going. "It would have been impossible without him," says the lexicographer and OED historian Peter Gilliver.

The first part was published in 1884, A to Ant, and instalments emerged at regular intervals for the next 40-odd years. Although Murray died in 1915 - somewhere between "Turndun" and "Tzirid" - the machine churned on. In 1928, the finished dictionary was eventually published: some 414,800 headwords and phrases in 10 volumes, each with a definition, etymology and 1.8m quotations tracking usage over time.

It was one of the largest books ever made, in any language: had you laid the metal type used end to end, it would have stretched from London to Manchester. Sixty years late it may have been, but the publisher made the most of the achievement, trumpeting that "the Oxford Dictionary is the supreme authority, and without a rival".

et if you knew where to look, its flaws were only too obvious. By the time it was published in 1928, this Victorian leviathan was already hopelessly out of date. The A-C entries were compiled nearly 50 years earlier; others relied on scholarship that had long been surpassed, especially in technology and science. In-house, it was admitted that the second half of the alphabet (M-Z) was stronger than the first (A-L); the letter E was regarded as especially weak. Among other eccentricities, Murray had taken against "marzipan", preferring to spell it "marchpane", and decreed that the adjective "African" should not be included, on the basis that it was not really a word. "American", however, was, for reasons that reveal much about the dictionary's lofty Anglocentric worldview.

The only solution was to patch it up. The first Supplement to the OED came out in 1933, compiling new words that editors had noted in the interim, as well as original omissions. Supplements to that Supplement were begun in 1957, eventually appearing in four instalments between 1972 and 1986 - some 69,300 extra items in all. Yet it was a losing battle, or a specialised form of Zeno's paradox: the closer that OED lexicographers got to the finish line, the more distant that finish line seemed to be.

At the same time, the ground beneath their feet was beginning to give way. By the late 1960s, a computer-led approach known as "corpus linguistics" was forcing lexicographers to re-examine their deepest assumptions about the way language operates. Instead of making dictionaries the old-fashioned way - working from pre-existing lists of words/definitions, and searching for evidence that a word means what you think it does - corpus linguistics turns the process on its head: you use digital technology to hoover up language as real people write and speak it, and make dictionaries from that. The first modern corpus, the Brown Corpus of Standard American English, was compiled in 1964 and included 1m words, sampled from 500 texts including romance novels, religious tracts and books of "popular lore" - contemporary, everyday sources that dictionary-makers had barely consulted, and which it had never been possible to examine en masse. The general-language corpora that provide raw material for today's dictionaries contain tens of billions of words, a database beyond the wildest imaginings of lexicographers even a generation ago.

There are no limits to the corpora that can be constructed: at a corpus linguistics conference in Birmingham last year, I watched researchers eavesdrop on college-age Twitter users (emojis have long since made "laughter forms" such as LOL and ROFL redundant, apparently) and comb through English judges' sentencing remarks for evidence of gender bias (all too present).

For lexicographers, what's really thrilling about corpus linguistics is the way it lets you spy on language in the wild. Collating the phrases in which a word occurs enables you to unravel different shades of meaning. Observing how a word is "misused" hints that its centre of gravity might be shifting. Comparing representative corpora lets you see, for example, how often Trump supporters deploy a noun such as "liberty", and how differently the word is used in the Black Lives Matter movement. "It's completely changed what we do," the lexicographer Michael Rundell told me. "It's very bottom-up. You have to rethink almost everything."

But while other dictionary publishers leapt on corpus linguistics, OED editors stuck to what they knew, resisting computerisation and relying on quotation slips and researchers in university libraries. In the 1970s and 80s there was little thought of overhauling this grandest of historical dictionaries, let alone keeping it up to date: it was as much as anyone could do to plug the original holes. When the OED's second edition was published in March 1989 - 20 volumes, containing 291,500 entries and 2.4m quotations - there were complaints that this wasn't really a new edition at all, just a nicely typeset amalgam of the old ones. The entry for "computer" defined it as "a calculating-machine; esp an automatic electronic device for performing mathematical or logical operations". It was illustrated by a quotation from a 1897 journal.

By astonishing coincidence, another earthquake, far bigger, struck the very same month that OED2 appeared in print: a proposal by an English computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee for "a large hypertext database with typed links". The world wide web, as it came to be called (OED dates the phrase to 1990), offered a shining path to the lexicographical future. Databases could be shared, and connected to one another; whole libraries of books could be scanned and their contents made searchable. The sum of human text was starting to become available to anyone with a computer and a modem.

The possibilities were dizzying. In a 1989 article in the New Yorker, an OUP executive said, with a shiver of excitement, that if the dictionary could incorporate corpus linguistics resources properly, something special could be achieved: "a Platonic concept - the ideal database". It was the same ideal laid out by Richard Chevenix Trench 132 years before: the English language over a thousand or more years, every single word of it, brought to light.

he fact that so much text is now available online has been the most cataclysmic change. Words that would previously have been spoken are now typed on social media. Lexicographers of slang have long dreamed of being able to track variant forms "down to the level, say, of an individual London tower block", says the slang expert and OED consultant Jonathon Green; now, via Facebook or Instagram, this might actually be possible. Lexicographers can be present almost at the moment of word-birth: where previously a coinage such as "mansplain" would have had to find its way into a durable printed record, which a researcher could use as evidence of its existence, it is now available near-instantly to anyone.

Anyone, and anywhere - when the OED was first dreamed up in the 1850s, English was a language of the British Isles, parts of North America, and a scattering of colonies. These days, nearly a quarter of the world's population, 1.5bn people, speak some English, mostly as a second language - except, of course, that it isn't one language. There are myriad regional variants, from the patois spoken in the West Indies and Pidgin forms of West Africa to a brood of compound offspring - Wenglish (Welsh English), Indlish or Hinglish (Indian/Hindi English), and the "Chinglish" of Hong Kong and Macau. All of these Englishes are more visible now than ever, each cross-fertilising others at greater and greater speed.

"The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference," James Murray once wrote, but modern lexicographers beg to differ. Instead of one centre, there are many intersecting subgroups, each using a variety of Englishes, inflected by geographical background or heritage, values, other languages, and an almost incalculable number of variables. And the circumference is expanding faster than ever. If OED lexicographers are right that around 7,000 new English words surface annually - a mixture of brand-new coinages and words the dictionary has missed - then in the time you've been reading this, perhaps two more words have come into being.

Most people, of course, now never go near a dictionary, but simply type phrases into Wikipedia (used more often as a dictionary than an encyclopedia, research suggests) or rely on Google, which - through a deal with Oxford Dictionaries - offers thumbnail definitions, audio recordings of pronunciations, etymology, a graph of usage over time and translation facilities. If you want to know what a word means, you can just yell something at Siri or Alexa.

Dictionaries have been far too slow to adjust, argues Jane Solomon of Dictionary.com. "Information-retrieval is changing so fast," she said. "Why don't dictionaries respond intelligently to the semantic or user context, like figuring out that you're searching for food words, and give you related vocabulary or recipes?" And not just words: "I'd love to include emojis; people are so creative with them. They've become a whole separate language. People sometimes need explanation; if you send your daughter the eggplant emoji, she might think that's weird."

Some have dared to dream even bigger than polysemous aubergines. One is a computer professor at the Sapienza University of Rome called Roberto Navigli, who in 2013 soft-launched a site called Babelnet, which aims to be the dictionary to beat all dictionaries - in part by not really being a dictionary at all. Described as a "semantic network" that pulls together 15 existing resources including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Microsoft Terminology, it aims to create a comprehensive, hierarchical root map of not just English but of 271 languages simultaneously, making it the largest lexicon/encyclopedia/thesaurus/reference work on the web. Navigli told me that his real aim was to use "semantic technology" to enable the holy grail for software engineers everywhere: autonomous machine-reading of text. "This is the dream, right?" he said. "The machine that can read text and understand everything we say."

Machines already understand a lot, of course. Some have talked of "culturomics", a form of computational lexicology that uses corpus tools to analyse and forecast trends in human behaviour. A 31-month study of Twitter tried to measure the shifting sentiments of the British population about austerity, and there is even a claim - somewhat disputed - that a "passively crowd-sourced" study of global media could have foretold the Arab spring. At least on a large scale, computers, and the information giants who own and lease the data, may be able to comprehend language better than we comprehend it ourselves.

For lexicographers and Google alike, one linguistic frontier remains stubbornly inaccessible. Whereas it's now easy to assemble written-text corpora and open a window on how language functions in a particular environment, doing so for spoken language has always been far harder. The reason is obvious: recording speech, then transcribing it and creating a usable database, is both time-consuming and hugely expensive. Speech corpora do exist, but are notoriously small and unrepresentative (it's easy to work with court transcripts; far harder to eavesdrop on what lawyers say down the pub).

For lexicographers, speech is the most precious resource of all, and the most elusive. If you could capture large samples of it - people speaking in every context imaginable, from playgrounds to office canteens to supermarkets - you could monitor even more accurately how we use language, day to day. "If we cracked the technology for transcribing normal conversations," Michael Rundell said, "it really would be a game-changer."

or OED's editors, this world is both exhilarating and, one senses, mildly overwhelming. The digital era has enabled Oxford lexicographers to run dragnets deeper and deeper through the language, but it has also threatened to capsize the operation. When you're making a historical dictionary and are required to check each and every resource, then recheck those resources when, say, a corpus of handwritten 17th-century letters comes on stream, the problem of keeping the dictionary up to date expands to even more nightmarish proportions. Adding to that dictionary to accommodate new words - themselves visible in greater numbers than ever before, mutating ever-faster - increases the nightmare exponentially. "In the early years of digital, we were a little out of control," Peter Gilliver told me. "It's never-ending," one OED lexicographer agreed. "You can feel like you're falling into the wormhole."

Adding to the challenge is a story that has become wearily familiar: while more people are consulting dictionary-like resources than ever, almost no one wants to shell out. Sales of hard-copy dictionaries have collapsed, far more calamitously than in other sectors. (OUP refused to give me figures, citing "commercial sensitivities". "I don't think you'll get any publisher to fess up about this," Michael Rundell told me.) While reference publishers amalgamate or go to the wall, information giants such as Google and Apple get fat by using our own search terms to sell us stuff. If you can get a definition by holding your thumb over a word on your smartphone, why bother picking up a book?

"Go to a dictionary conference these days and you see scared-looking people," Rundell said. Although he trained as a lexicographer, he now mainly works as a consultant, advising publishers on how to use corpus-based resources. "It used to be a career," he went on. "But there just aren't the jobs there were 30 years ago." He pointed to his shelves, which were strikingly bare. "But then I'm not sentimental about print; I gave most of my dictionaries away."

Even if the infrastructure around lexicography has fallen away or been remade entirely, some things stay pleasingly consistent. Every lexicographer I spoke to made clear their distaste for "word-lovers", who in the dictionary world are regarded as the type of person liable to scrawl "fewer" on to supermarket signs reading "10 items or less", or recite "antidisestablishmentarianism" to anyone who will listen. The normally genial John Simpson writes crisply that "I take the hardline view that language is not there to be 'enjoyed'"; instead, it is there to be used.

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The first edition of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, published in 1928. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

But love is, most grudgingly admit, what draws people to spend their lives sifting and analysing language. It takes a particular sort of human to be a "word detective": something between a linguistics academic, an archival historian, a journalist and an old-fashioned gumshoe. Though hardly without its tensions - corpus linguists versus old-school dictionary-makers, stats nerds versus scholarly etymologists - lexicography seems to be one specialist profession with a lingering sense of common purpose: us against that ever-expanding, multi-headed hydra, the English language. "It is pretty obsessive-compulsive," Jane Solomon said.

The idea of making a perfect linguistic resource was one most lexicographers knew was folly, she continued. "I've learned too much about past dictionaries to have that as a personal goal." But then, part of the thrill of being a lexicographer is knowing that the work will never be done. English is always metamorphosing, mutating, evolving; its restless dynamism is what makes it so absorbing. "It's always on the move," said Solomon. "You have to love that."

There are other joys, too: the thrill of catching a new sense, or crafting a definition that feels, if not perfect, at least right. "It sounds cheesy, but it can be like poetry," Michael Rundell reflected. "Making a dictionary is as much an art as a craft."

Despite his pessimism about the industry, he talked with real excitement about a project he was about to join, working with experts from the Goldfield Aboriginal Language Centre on indigenous Australian languages, scantily covered by lexicographers. "Dictionaries can make a genuine difference," he said. "They give power to languages that might have had very little power in the past; they can help preserve and share it. I really believe that."

Throughout it all, OED churns on, attempting to be ever so slightly more complete today than it was yesterday or the day before. The dictionary team now prefer to refer to it as a "moving document". Words are only added; they are never deleted. When I suggested to Michael Proffitt that it resembled a proud but leaky Victorian warship whose crew were trying to keep out the leaks and simultaneously keep it on course, he looked phlegmatic. "I used to say it was like painting the Forth bridge, never-ending. But then they stopped - a new kind of paint, I think." He paused. "Now it's just us."

These days OED issues online updates four times a year; though it has not officially abandoned the idea of another print edition, that idea is fading. Seven months after I first asked how far they had got into OED3, I enquired again; the needle had crept up to 48.7%. "We are going to get it done," Proffitt insisted, though as I departed Oxford, I thought James Murray might have raised a thin smile at that. If the update does indeed take until 2037, it will rival the 49 years it took the original OED to be created, whereupon it will presumably need overhauling all over again.

A few days ago, I emailed to see if "mansplain" had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag - further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Paton's entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted "mansplain" on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.

* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
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Inside the OED: can the world's biggest dictionary survive the internet?

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In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could "mansplain" a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain.

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Steven Poole

he archaic sounding "suffrage" has risen energetically from its lexical slumbers this week, as it's the centenary of the extension of voting rights to (some) women in Britain. Originally, "suffrage" meant prayers. But what is directed at God may as well be directed at earthly powers, so from the 1500s it came to mean an assenting vote or opinion, and then any kind of vote, and then a group's collective vote.

From the early 19th century, "suffragists" in Britain and the US wanted to extend democratic rights to excluded groups. In 1897 the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies was formed in the UK, and its adherents were all "suffragists". Not until 1906 was the alternative term "suffragette" coined - in the Daily Mail, and intended as a term of abuse, replacing "-ist" with the belittling, gender-specific "-ette".

But some suffragists, impatient with their colleagues' slow reformism, quickly claimed the term "suffragette", Emmeline Pankhurst among them. Historians disagree on which group did more to advance the cause, but we can at least agreethat David Bowie wouldn't have sounded as good singing "Suffragist City".
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On the centenary of the 1918 suffrage act, what does suffrage actually mean?

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Steven Poole he archaic sounding "suffrage" has risen energetically from its lexical slumbers this week, as it's the centenary of the extension of voting rights to (some) women in Britain. Originally, "suffrage" meant prayers.

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Suggestive emojis and deep likes: a guide to micro-cheating

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It's hard to keep up with what constitutes good social media etiquette and what looks like flirting. Here's a quick guide to avoiding accidental infidelity online

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CHANGE J Aitchison's Potential, Diffusion, Implementation & Codification Model Chen (1968 &1972) - gradual then accelerating change, before levelling off - the S-curve Model Bailey C.J. (1973) - Wave Model: how changes weaken exponentially across a particular geographical region & across different social groups Theory of Lexical Gaps - a word will...

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From feminism to broflake: the words of 2017

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In the year of Harvey Weinstein and Wonder Woman, of 'collusion' and even more 'fake news', Steven Poole assesses the lexical novelties

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'A special place for Luxembourgish': Grand Duchy's native language enjoys renaissance

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Luxembourg's government has a 40-point action plan to build on the renewed popularity of its national tongue, traditionally spoken at home

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Resistance to changes in grammar is futile, say researchers

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Linguists say that random chance plays a bigger role than previously thought in the evolution of language - but also that 'English is weird'

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Why 'Bushman banter' was crucial to hunter-gatherers' evolutionary success

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The Ju/'hoansi people of the Kalahari have always been fiercely egalitarian. They hate inequality or showing off, and shun formal leadership institutions. It's what made them part of the most successful, sustainable civilisation in human history

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Don't press send ... The new rules for good writing in the 21st century

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Entertain, don't be afraid of a bit of filth, but be cautious with your XXXs - the essential guide to getting your message across while avoiding the pitfalls of communication

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How will Brits speak in 50 years? The Sound of 2066

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A new report commissioned by HSBC has been released which reveals the future sounds and languages of British cities in 2066. The report, written by Dr Dominic Watt, a Sociolinguistics Expert from the University of York, reveals that in 50 years' time, the keyboard will become obsolete as speech becomes our main way of interacting with machines, impacting the way we talk.

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Grammar_Change - is 'correct' grammar a Myth

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FuzzyGrammar - Language play and language change

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Accent and Dialect in School - Dan Clayton

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How Languages take words from each other - Rosen

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Phone technology and the shaping of new texts - A Goddard

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English spellings dont match the sounds they are supposed to represent - Spelling reform

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I freely acknowledge that, in a list of this sort, "glossary" is a fancy Latin word for a collection of pet peeves (noun, 1919), meaning an annoyance or irritation. One of my peeves is that, as a noun originating in America, it had not been admitted into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1968) on my desk in London when I edited the Sunday Times. Now, it is recognised ("back-formation from peevish"). I admit I have no evidence for believing that the neglect of peeve is to blame for angering the poltergeist Peeves in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Affect/Effect You can only affect something that already exists. When it does, you can effect, or bring about, a change in it. To say: "It effected a change in his attitude" is correct; so is: "It affected his attitude." To combine the two - "It affected a change in his attitude" - is silly.

Alibi Means "proof that one was elsewhere" but is confused with "excuse", which has a wider generality. Let us save "alibi" for the precision of proving you were not within a mile of the kitchen when the last slice of apple pie vanished.

Alternatives Wrongly used for "choices". If there are two choices, they are properly called "alternatives". If there are more than two, they are choices. But in 2017, the tides of the expedient post-truth era sapped centuries of definition. Kellyanne Conway, a counsellor to Donald Trump, explained to NBC's Chuck Todd that press secretary Sean Spicer's series of falsehoods inflating the crowds at the Trump inauguration weren't lies, they were "alternative facts".

Anticipate Confused with "expect". To expect something is to think it may happen; to anticipate is to prepare for it, to act in advance. To say a fiancee expects marriage is correct; to say she is anticipating marriage defames the lady.

Blatant/Flagrant It's best to use "blatant" for offence that is glaringly obvious, without care, brazen. Best use "flagrant" to emphasise a serious breach of law or regulation.

Chronic Confused with "acute" or "severe", medically the opposite. It means long-lasting (from the Greek chronos, "time"). An acute illness comes to a crisis; a chronic one lingers.

Compose/Comprise Compose means "to form" or "constitute". Comprise means "to contain, include, be made up of". The whole comprises the parts. The US comprises 50 states; 50 states do not comprise the US. After the 2014 referendum on independence for Scotland, the UK still comprised England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Continual/Continuous "Continual interruptions" says it all, meaning the speaker resumed his argument after the interruption. The speech was not continuous, as a river is, because the flow was broken.

Crescendo Confused with "climax". It indicates a passage of music to be played with increasing volume. Figuratively, it means "to rise to a climax". Thus the cliche "Rise to a crescendo" is nonsense.

Decimate Confused with "destroy". By derivation, decimation means "killing one in 10". Today, it is often used figuratively to mean "very heavy casualties", but to say "completely decimated" or "decimated as much as half the town" simply will not do.

Dilemma Confused with "problem". If you have a problem, you do not know what to do. There may be many solutions. If you have a dilemma, you have a choice of two courses of action, neither attractive.

Disinterested/Uninterested If you're in some messy dispute, you don't want an uninterested arbiter, judge or mediator, so uninterested he nods off. You don't want an arbiter who has a selfish interest, declared or concealed. You want a neutral, disinterested person who cares enough for truth.

Entomb Confused with trap. The trapped miners may be alive; entombed miners are dead, ie in a tomb.

Flotsam/Jetsam Married in common parlance, but divorced in maritime law. Jetsam is stuff jettisoned, thrown overboard by the crew of a ship to lighten the load in stormy seas. If you find this stuff, it's yours. Flotsam is cargo or wreckage floating in the sea. Flotsam is legally the property of the vessel's owner.

Forego/Forgo: Forego means "to go before in time or place" - think of the final e in before. To forgo is to give up or relinquish.

Gourmet/Gourmand The gourmet, one with a refined, discriminating taste for the best food and wine, will be insulted to be called a gourmand, a glutton fond of good things.

Inchoate/Incoherent "Inchoate" describes something not ready to be judged "incoherent", which means "lacking clarity". The inchoate idea or thing is embryonic, in the early stages of being formed.

Incumbent As a noun, the current holder of an office; a "former incumbent" is nonsense. But when you hold an office, it is incumbent (adjective) on you to perform your duties.

Inflammable/Flammable Danger in a word again. The prefix "in-" might suggest that something inflammable won't catch fire, that it is comparable to the absolutes "incapable" and "invulnerable". But it does catch fire as easily as anything flammable, because the two words mean the same. (The prefix "in-" in this case means "into", not "non".)

Insidious/Invidious Both nasty, but "insidious" is evil by stealth; you don't know the worm is in the apple. The invidious utterance or person invites odium more openly.

Judicial/Judicious Judicial means "connected with a court of law"; judicious means "wise". Not all judicial decisions are judicious.

Less/Fewer "Less" is right for quantities - less coffee, less sugar. It means "a smaller amount". "Fewer" is right for comparing numbers - fewer people, fewer houses; less dough results in fewer loaves. Nobody would think of saying fewer coffee, fewer sugar, but every day somebody writes "less houses".

Litigate Did you hear what happened in the court case to make Trump release his tax returns? No? Neither did anyone else. In January 2017, while telling ABC why Trump would not keep the off-and-on promise, Conway said: "We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care. They voted for him." Wrong verb. To litigate is to enter a lawsuit. Better verb for the serial flip-flopping: "dodged".

Luxuriant/Luxurious The film star can have a luxurious car that is "full of luxury", but not a luxuriant car. That would mean the car that is producing abundantly, growing profusely, since "luxuriant" refers to something that grows.

Momentarily You have to hope the pilot and stewards are lying when they say: "We will be in the air momentarily." That does not mean: "We will be in the air in a few minutes." It means: "We will be in the air for a moment." That is strictly speaking, of course, but what is the point of having words if they mean nothing?

Prescribe/Proscribe Opposite meanings. An action or product that is proscribed by authority is banned. A "prescription" is advised, recommended.

Refugee/Migrant War and terrorism in Iraq and Syria forced millions of people to flee and seek refuge in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and western Europe, notably Germany. They were refugees, but they became migrants, unwelcome in countries that feared to admit them for security, religious or economic reasons.

Refute A strong verb, meaning "to disprove, to demonstrate falsehood". It has been emaciated by its careless confusion with "rebut", "reply", "response" and, less forgivably, "deny". A denial is merely a contrary assertion; it does not demonstrate the falsity of the assertion. Nor does "rebut". A rebuttal is a denial dressed up in battle armour.

Regalia Regal means "of or by kings", and regalia means "the insignia of royalty". "Royal regalia" is therefore tautologous, and "the regalia of a bishop" is contradictory. Freemasons, however, have adopted the term for their insignia.

Replica/Reproduction Ask for your money back if you buy "a virtual replica" of the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon or any work of art. You may have bought a good reproduction, copy, duplicate, model or facsimile, but a replica is one recreated by the original creator, so there is no such thing as "a virtual replica". It either is or isn't. The journalist James Kilpatrick, who manned the barricades to defend the integrity of "replica", was cross, with reason, that the respected Smithsonian magazine offered "an almost incredibly authentic replica of the Titanic - a replica that measured 3in in length".

Sceptic/Denier The sceptic questions the evidence; the denier flatly rejects it.

Transpire Wrongly used to mean, merely, "happen". It comes from the Latin spirare, "breathe". To "transpire" is to emit through the surface of leaves or skin and, figuratively, is best used for when some fact oozes out, especially a secret.

Viable/Feasible "Viable" means capable of independent life - a viable foetus or seed or, figuratively, in the sense of "capable of succeeding", a candidate. "Feasible" means "capable of being done, accomplished" - a feasible plan.

Viral Unwelcome adjective as related to Ebola, Zika and other nasty viruses. Much desired by websites in the internet age (since 1999); an item "gone viral" has been passed person to person so many times as to seem contagious.

Virtually Incorrectly used to mean "nearly all"; eg: "Virtually all the chocolates were eaten." "Virtually" is useful for an imprecise description that is more or less right, close enough, as good as. "He's virtually the manager." He does not have the title, but he manages the business.
This is an extract from Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters by Harold Evans, published by Little Brown. To buy this book for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. P&P charges may apply.

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The 35 words you're (probably) getting wrong

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I freely acknowledge that, in a list of this sort, "glossary" is a fancy Latin word for a collection of pet peeves (noun, 1919), meaning an annoyance or irritation. One of my peeves is that, as a noun originating in America, it had not been admitted into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1968) on my desk in London when I edited the Sunday Times.