Twitter

“A hundred and ten” (BrE)

Arnold Zwicky’s post “Year names and number names” at the Language Log treats the pronunciation of numbers.
For me, this article is interesting for two reasons:

1) I’ve learned what to call the two different styles (with and without “and”):

a) conjoined reading, like “two thousand and ten”
b) juxtaposed reading, like “two thousand ten”

2) I’ve learned that juxtaposed [...]

January 14th, 2010 | Category: English language, U.S.A., UK, blog | Comments are closed

David Bowie and Bing Crosby Sing “The Little Drummer Boy”

Again, the Open Culture blog has something to make me watch and click and read: David Bowie and Bing Crosby Sing “The Little Drummer Boy”.
They link to the background story to that at the site of the Washington Post (20 Dec 2006) and include the embedded YouTube video which I’m also, gratefully, offering here – [...]

December 17th, 2008 | Category: Musik, U.S.A., UK | Comments are closed

Queen Elizabeth II visits Google’s British HQ

Oh! it is a glorious thing, I ween,
to be a regular modern queen.

With this subtle allusion to a classic British piece of world literature, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that Her Royal Highness deigned to visit the Headquarters of Google UK. And what did she do there, you may well ask? [...]

October 16th, 2008 | Category: Advertising, GB, Internet, UK | Comments are closed

Corduroy Mansions – online novel by Alexander McCall Smith

Only just discovered: The Telegraph offers a podcast of one chapter a day of Alexander McCall Smith’s first online novel:
“Corduroy Mansions” by Alexander McCall Smith.
I listened to Chapter 14: The Names of Dogs, read by Andrew Sachs, and I quite enjoyed it. He has a pleasant voice which transports the little ironies in McCall Smith’s [...]

October 1st, 2008 | Category: General, Internet, Literatur, UK | One comment

United Kingdom English for the American Novice

Terry Gliedt, who grew up in Iowa and Wisconsin, worked for IBM for many years and works now with the University of Michigan. He spent some years of his professional life in the UK, from 1981 to 1983. He seems to have encountered a few awkward situations when his (American) vocabulary turned out to be [...]

September 24th, 2008 | Category: English language, U.S.A., UK | Comments are closed