Or if you prefer, The Day of the Dead. Which is today, because confusingly, yesterday was All Saints’ Day (AKA All Hallows’ Day). Both days are quite different though.
Another couple of weeks, another European leader whose name we need to figure out how to pronounce.
Yes, it’s Hallowe’en again! Time to have a look at an appropriately spooky word. But first, a challenge:
Can you think of an English word, not borrowed from another language, that has an accent or other diacritic? (a diacritic is simply any glyph added to a letter: see here for examples).
Writing about the etymology of the word clock yesterday reminded me of when I wrote about the word to decimate recently, and how people are fond of citing its original meaning as being to reduce by 10%, even though that’s not true.
As I said before, I can understand people having this misconception, and I can understand the instinct to correct people. There have always been people who’ve acted this way about language, but recently I’ve noticed more and more people taking such a prescriptive approach to English.
If you’re happy to just read my posts on this website, then please feel free to ignore this. That’s probably what I’d do. I’ve created pages for my blog on social media for two main reasons: to stop friends being bombarded with blog stuff on my personal profiles, and because apparently you’re supposed to do this to get more people to visit and so on. As you can perhaps tell, I find it hard to put much effort into this, though I’m still needy and insecure enough to want as many readers as possible.
If you’re a heavy social-media user, you might want to connect with this blog via such media, and you can do so via these links (which can also be found on the About page and via the little widgets on the website itself): Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 