Have you visited Yew Nork? Does your stummy ache? What dog of bag food will we get? In case you’ve wondered what causes such speech errors or slips of the tongue, you might like to know that all speakers – of all ages and abilities – make them sometimes. Even people who use a sign language produce […] … learn more→
Blog Archives

Why do people have slips of the tongue?

“Cult objects”: Headphones
Inanimate objects, do you have a soul? asked the poet. If they have a soul, it is ours. This is what the semiologist Roland Barthes demonstrated in his Mythologies , published in 1957. The intellectual indeed studied there the objects and the popular rites which revealed the spirit of an era and the collective affects of the country, thus […] … learn more→

7 ways to spot polarizing language — how to choose responsibly what to amplify online or in-person
Words have consequences. They can make us feel love, anger, fear, hope. Those emotions, depending on how strongly they’re felt, can incite actions. Communication scholars, ancient rhetoricians, legal scholars and psychologists have all studied some of the most basic pathways along which words do their work — how love is sustained in lasting relationships, how political leaders rally troops to war, […] … learn more→

Tact, virtue of the pedagogue
Tact is primitively the sense of touch. It is not only through what we discover the tangible properties of a thing (its fluidity, softness, hardness, shape, temperature, dryness or humidity), it is also sensitivity, it is that is, touching the thing. Unlike sight, which is a sense of distance, it requires contact. In a second sense, which […] … learn more→

Perks of online spell checking
Proofreading is probably one of the most important parts of writing. As a lot of professional writers often say, “writing is rewriting.” It then follows that how effective you are with proofreading greatly effects how proficient you are as a writer. However, proofreading your own work can sometimes be tedious when done unaided, especially when […] … learn more→

Setting up your website right, the first time
In today’s fast-paced and technology driven environment, having a website for your business is absolutely essential. Whether you are just starting your start-up, or running an established business, not having a website, or having one that is poorly designed, can be a giant obstacle to growing your business. More often than not, companies have to […] … learn more→

Language could be humankind’s most impressive technological invention
Humans have speculated about the emergence of language and linguistic diversity since Antiquity. Perhaps the earliest reference to this question is in the book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian Bible. In this narrative, God spoke to Adam and gave him authority to name every being in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve could apparently […] … learn more→

The BFG reminds us that wordplay is part of learning and mastering language
Now that Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel The BFG has finally been transformed into a big screen feature film courtesy of Disney and director Steven Spielberg, one aspect of the book that has delighted children and adults alike will be made more obvious: the Big Friendly Giant’s tendency to gobblefunk, the BFG’s own term for the […] … learn more→
These 3 words are the telltale sign of a rubbish script
There are actually, in my experience, two giveaways for crummy screenplays or teleplays. The first is the extent to which characters address each other by name. If you’re writing dialogue with no ear for actual speech, it sort of makes sense to put down lines like “This isn’t about the money, Brian,” or “I long […] … learn more→
Wordsmith Bingo
My Facebook (and actual) friend Gene Seymour posted this the other day: Some 40 years ago, Wilfrid Sheed began his post-mortem for Cyril Connolly by asking who the best living writer of English prose is now. His pal John Leonard made a case for Malcolm Muggeridge while Sheed tossed out such eminences of the era […] … learn more→