How do we explain the general homogeneity of the Australian accent (almost no variation in a country 30 times the size of Britain)? What is Australian English, anyway? (Is it more than just the accent?) This post explores these questions, and influences on Australian English—from colonial times to present day.
All I do is keep the beat and bad company—Mark Knopfler This is an a example of syllepsis, a fun rhetorical device...
None of us are safe from the anchoring bias. The way we reason is coloured by our experiences, our parents' experiences, where we live, what we do. And little behavioural shortcuts are hardwired into our brains—these might help us make quicker decisions, but they don’t help us make better ones. One of them is the [...]
A noun is a thing, like an apple or regret. If we talk about a red apple or a great regret, both ‘red’ and ‘great’ are adjectives. So what’s an adverb?
There’s this thing called the WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They set out all the good things you need to do to make your content accessible for people with disability, people including those with vision impairment (an estimated 300,000 in Australia alone), and also people with other kinds of disability, such as cognitive or motor [...]
English is full of relics, throwbacks to old words or expressions, that often only remain in a single contemporary term or expression. Like 'teller' in 'bank teller'. Tell is an old word meaning 'to count', and we don't see it anywhere else...
Talking is tricky. If you've ever fallen over your tongue trying to pronounce a new term, or just tried to speak too quickly, you'll know this. Because the act of speaking happens in near real time, and is so deeply ingrained in our muscle memory, we tend to forget that there are physical things to [...]
See this simple sentence: The dog bit the cat. It's built of these basic bits: The dog [subject] bit [verb] the cat [object]. You would never dream of putting a comma after the subject and before the verb: The dog, bit the cat. [No. You wouldn't do this, would you?] But when the subject is a longer noun phrase, many people (I catch myself sometimes) will want to add a comma after the subject, just it feels like there should be a pause...
To my ever-expanding frustration, and general astonishment (to which my wife expresses a weary kind of amazement: why are you so surprised, you know it does that...), things never seem to go entirely smoothly. (And if they do, I'm left with a trepidatious feeling that things in fact haven't gone smoothly, and that I just [...]
—This is an em dash. It is the width of a capital M. –This is an en dash. It is the width of a capital N. -This is a hyphen. It is the width of... er... a hyphen. The hyphen is not a dash. It's a hyphen—used to hyphenate things; intra-word punctuation, generally. It is [...]
