This current difficulty is a mash-up of the phrases it pains me (to do something) and I am loath to (do something) with loath meaning ‘reluctant’.
Read More
A misnomer is a name inappropriately applied to something of someone because it does not fit their nature. To call a bleak swamp Paradise Gardens is to give it a misnomer.
Read More
We used to be enamoured of various things, but in recent times a hesitancy has crept in about what the correct following particle should be. There are quite a few people who think that by is the right choice and that of sounds weird and with is not quite convincing.
Read More
If you have sympathy for someone you feel sorry for them because they are in a bad situation. Your sympathy is often expressed in words and gestures to show that you care. Used more generally, to sympathise with someone is to share their point of view, to agree with them.
Read More
The notion of the body as a mere case for the soul goes back to the 1600s in British English, but in the early 1900s to worry the soul case out of someone was an expression in Australian English, borrowed from southern American English but common enough here.
Read More
I have noticed the metaphorical use of guardrails has been achieving cliché level. It seems we cannot take a step in business, government or personal relationships without setting up strong guardrails.
Read More
Most Australians, at least, those of an older generation, will react as negatively to gotten as they do to the spelling color. They regard both as hateful Americanisms. But so often it is the case that the words that we regard as markers of one particular English have actually been in English English at some particular point in the past.
Read More
A contributor has noticed that Australian news presenters are often using cardinal numbers instead of ordinal numbers in giving dates. For example: The meeting will be held on June 5. Canadians and Americans would prefer June 5th.
Read More
Mitigate. Militate. The two words are close and not commonly used so it is perhaps understandable that when we reach for them we sometimes pick up the wrong one.
Read More
There is a new use of champion in commercial and government organisations that is intriguing. It seems to flow on from the meaning ‘a person who espouses a cause’. The essence of a champion seems to be conviction and communication skills.
Read More
The blog on linguistic pet hates produced an outburst from one reader who is vehemently opposed to the use of the plural skies. ‘I struggle to find a convincing reason why the word should exist. Last I checked we only had one sky! So why the word skies?
Read More
We all have a sensitivity to words that seem to be the fashion of the moment, words that grate on our ear just because of their frequency of use. I must admit I hadn’t registered beloved among these but it appears that Ross Gittins has.
Read More
The dictionaries have no problem with coronate as an adjective (from Latin corona crown, coronatus crowned), often used in botany and zoology to mean ‘crested’. Its use as a verb to coronate with a past participle coronated is much less common.
Read More
The third time I heard someone say, just in a matter of days, that such-and-such an event was incredulous (instead of incredible), I thought I should write about it. There is no reason to confuse these two words. It would be nice if we could keep them separate.
Read More
This is the term that the Americans use for what we call Swiss cheese. They were taken to task by the cheese producers of France and Switzerland who wanted to claim that only the cheese produced in the Gruyère region of Switzerland and France could be given this name.
Read More
The politician talking on the radio said that something had ‘exasperated the situation’. I thought this might have been a slip of the tongue that can easily happen in an interview so I had a look on Google, not expecting to find much. Seven and a half million instances of ‘exasperated the situation’.
Read More
We were introduced to the expression top of mind in the 1950s when it was part of the jargon of advertising and marketing. These experts wanted to create the situation where a particular brand was top of mind, that is, at the forefront of a person’s awareness.
Read More
The Oxford English Dictionary gives this as the primary spelling although it lists femme sole as a variant. It translates into English as ‘single woman’. This description popped up in a Sydney title deed of 1958. This is an historical legal term dating back to British law of the 1600s. It is one of the many legal terms which the British acquired as a result of the Norman conquest.
Read More
We all know that we should use fewer when we are dealing with discrete units that are countable, and less when we/are dealing with a noun that cannot be counted.But what happens when we specify that there is one less. Immediately we are in a world of counting so it really should be one fewer.
Read More
Some words have ended up with the same form in English today despite their different origins. There are other words that end up with forms dangerously close to each other so that we become confused about which is which.
Read More