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Category Archives: Language

Here’s why.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

TweetA trend I’ve noticed recently in article writing is to talk in the way that politicians popularised when answering questions in ‘interviews’, but in fact just have a pre-prepared point to make. It’s incredibly annoying, lazy, and I suspect hides many a flawed argument. Here’s why: See? How irritating was that? there are other forms [...]

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Horses and Shit

Thursday, October 14, 2010

TweetHaving read Andrew Marr’s little outburst recently on the subject of bloggers, my first reaction was that he was way off the mark. As Krishnan Guru Murthy pointed out, his comments seemed “unfortunately like the very things he describes: ‘strangely angry and rather abusive’”. It’s certainly true that every day I read something on the [...]

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Sadly Optimistic

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

TweetI find language fascinating, and I think the reason is that there are so many levels it is interesting on. On the one hand I can’t resist a good pun, fish joke or spoonerism, and on the other I’ve spent many a happy hour reconstructing grammatical trees of obscure sentences. The differences between languages, the [...]

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