Category: History
Double negatives in English – a big no no
Picture it: you are sitting in an English class and a teacher says “don’t use double negatives”. Double negative? What is a double negative? How can anything be negative twice? What is a double negative? A double negative in the content of language is when a sentence has multiple negative words. A negative word can…
Doublets (and Triplets) in English
Have you ever heard of doublets before? No, I don’t mean a type of old-fashioned men’s shirt used until the 17th century, I mean doublets in the linguistic sense. A doublet in linguistics is two words that have something in common. Usually, this ‘thing in common’ has to do with where the words originally come…
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Have you ever typed an unknown word into Google to figure out what it means and come across a website called UrbanDictionary? If not, I highly recommend it. Warning: this website includes many vulgar terms and while it is constantly evolving, changing, and growing in size, anyone can edit it, so many of the examples are…
A Brief Post on the History and Use of Scientific English
So you may have seen my post on The Basic Characteristics of Scientific English, but what is it all for and where did it come from? What is the history of Scientific English? If you have wondered these questions, you have certainly come to the right place! History Elements of Scientific writing have been identified as…
Great Vowel Shift
Have you ever wondered why English pronunciation is so difficult? Why are words written one way but pronounced in another? In addition to English’s bastard origins, there was a great event over a couple of centuries of extreme linguistic and phonological importance called the Great Vowel Shift. Questions, questions? So what is this Great Vowel…
The Most Important Word in the English Language and Its History
What is the most important word in the English language? How can we even begin to classify words in terms of their importance? What does that even mean? To answer this question, we need to look at some history. History and language For anyone who has studied a little bit of British history, you know…
English As She Is Spoke
(This post was inspired by a from Curiosity on English As She Is Spoke. This post is not sponsored by anyone, although it may read that way. Who knows, maybe that will change in the future! *hint, hint*) Hello everyone! So I have been doing a lot of posting on travelling (and some on language…
