News and articles

There’s someone washing her knickers in my bathroom. I’ve politely explained that our washing machine handles underwear just as well as it does the big stuff, but she has equally politely pointed out in response that this is “a question of hygiene”. Er, OK. At least she’s left the door open so that the children …

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A few weeks ago, I promised you a story about a language that rose from the dead. Well, our linguistic Lazarus is in fact the indigenous American tongue of Wampanoag, also known by such other names as Wôpanâak and “Massachusett language”. And yes, there’s a clue in the latter moniker – it was once the …

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Would you pay a fortune hiring a world-renowned star performer for your team and then leave him to fend for himself in a new world he doesn’t fully understand? We’ve blogged on exactly this subject before, but evidence continues to emerge that rugby clubs are just as bad as their footy counterparts when it comes …

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“Critically endangered” doesn’t sound like anything much to boast about – but if you’re talking about the Cornish language, then it’s time to break out the bunting and uncork the champers. Up until December 2010, it was listed by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as “extinct”, so this would appear to be …

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In today’s world of intense media scrutiny, it’s almost always bad news when “the medium becomes the message”; e.g. when a public figure wants to talk to you about something, but what actually happens is that you end up talking about the person him/herself, rather than the thing that person was trying to talk about. …

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So the BBC are being their usual snarky selves about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Mandarin exploit – a Chinese New Year speech in, yes, Chinese. Rather than lauding Zuck’s obvious linguistic achievement, Auntie chooses to lead with the insinuation that the whole thing was little more than a publicity stunt to butter up a country in …

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