It’s a big night on Thursday at the Idler Academy, which hosts its second annual Bad Grammar awards. The founder Tom Hodgkinson promises “a thrilling X-factor for pedants”. This year’s judges – Jeremy Paxman, restaurateur Rowley Leigh and the Guardian’s own Hadley Freeman – will be assessing a shortlist that includes Tesco (for their “most tastiest” orange…
Category Archive for: English grammar
If any place should set the standard for good grammar, it ought to be the English city of Cambridge, where the university’s brick-and-ivy walls preserve centuries of the world’s highest learning. So when the public caught wind of a little-noticed rule passed by the Cambridge City Council to drop apostrophes from future street signs to…
Fellow grammar snobs, I feel I must resign from your ranks. Sure, we’ve had some good times—not just when we judged the masses, but especially when we got the chance to snicker about one another’s mistakes. I do still believe that good communication is important to success. But while you and I were bickering about…
I must be getting more sensitive to bad grammar in blog posts, email newsletters and other types of content marketing. These errors glare out from the content and totally distract me from the topic of interest. The sad truth is that these grammar mistakes are found in the material of some of the top content…
Despite its reputation, grammar is colourful and fascinating. Now experts report a renewed interest in the subject. A 15-year-old boy made headlines last week after writing a passionate letter of complaint to Tesco regarding bad grammar on its bottles of orange juice. Tesco claimed it used the “most tastiest” oranges, rather than “tastiest”, “most tasty” or “distinctly…
Seeing how diverse and fluid English grammar is, it’s hard to draw up precise, firm rules. What’s wrong with that sentence? Factually, nothing: at times it’s very hard indeed. But grammatically, maybe? Still nothing, in my view. But some pedants would not agree. And they have a point. Their point, which they see as a…
A woman’s place is in the bosom of her family; her thoughts ought seldom to emerge from it. The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, Volume 97, 1825 Those nineteenth-century moralists! Can you imagine what today’s world would have been like if women such as Florence Nightingale, Emmeline Pankhurst, or Harriet Beecher Stowe had confined their thoughts to family life?…
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