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Last month, Chris sought to understand – insofar as any sane person can – the use of language by Donald Trump. Is he a skilled orator playing 4D chess? Or just a teenage boy trapped in the body of a 78-year-old man? In any case, his unusual use of capitalisation has a surprising forebearer: 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson.

Reading a typical Truth Social post from President Donald Trump is a wild ride, rhetorically speaking. Apart from the name-calling and the ALL-CAPS DECLARATIVES about how weak his enemies are, there's the weird thing he does with capitalisation, where he caps the beginning of words for seemingly no good reason. Trump doesn't save his odd linguistic...

X(Christ)mas is on the doorstep, and th(an)x(ks) for that! Twitter's become X and we'll soon be xxx(kiss)ing under the mistletoe. So, maybe it's time to shine a light on the letter 'x'. As a standalone with many a meaning, it deserves to be centre stage, if just this once.

I simply couldn't help it, after my claim in September's blog that you hadn't seen the last of the apostrophe yet! A few weeks on from that blog, I came across this article (below) in The Guardian by Philip Oltermann, European culture editor, dated Mon 7 Oct 2024 (Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets official approval...

A few months ago, a viral video caught my attention: 19-month-old Orla from Liverpool 'speaking' fluent scouse without saying a single real word. While she can't yet do what we'd define as talking, she has the sounds and intonations of her local accent down to a T. And it's almost certain she'll sound largely the same as an adult.

Whether it concerns the possessive form or pluralisation, the apostrophe always seems to signal one of two reactions: panic or complacency. Let's take the possessive form for proper nouns (names) for starters. Debate about this started soon after Joe Biden cleared the way for Kamala Harris to run for US President last month. Is it Harris' or...

Translation is tricky enough when fluent in the target language, but Pedro Carolino took things a step further with his 1855 Portuguese-English phrase book English as She is Spoke. Unable to speak any English, Carolino used a French-English dictionary to translate an earlier Portuguese-French guidebook, resulting in such idioms – or 'idiotisms', as...

When you start blogging, you're never quite sure where it will take you. I guess it was as much an impulse as conscious strategy just over six years ago to write about my 'feelings' with the birth of the new CPLS website. As I wrote back then, "let it be a collage of my reflections at this point in time....

When the political scientist Steven Weber compared translation to transportation, he was talking of ideas and knowledge not of people and goods. Instead of a horse-drawn carriage, it's now a process of accelerated multilingual communication, especially with the use of AI tools. Since the adoption of neural networks in 2015, translation algorithms...

When I was an English teacher in China, I was asked by a student why we say 'two million' rather than 'two millions'. His logic was sound: two of something makes it plural and plurals usually end with an 's'. It's never satisfying to then have to tell a student that he'll need to just ignore logic to learn English...