When Do I Put Full Stops Inside Parentheses?

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

Good question, and one I’ve been asking myself a lot while I’ve been writing lately.

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Smart Working

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Unprecedented times. Challenging, uncertain, trying times.

I’m sure you’ve heard it all at this stage, and probably will for a while yet (for any of you reading this in the future, I’m writing this on 9th September 2020, that should tell you everything!) I’m not going to write about the ongoing global pandemic, but rather that a term that I first heard because of it: smart working!

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I Haven’t Got the Stomach for It

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After writing yesterday about how the word revolting comes from the stomach (not literally: that’d be, well, revolting), I was thinking about just how much of a role that organ plays in the English language.

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The Peasants are Revolting

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An easy joke, that one there in the title. But have you ever wondered why revolting has two such distinct meanings which let us make the joke in the first place?

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Quite Appealing

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I thought about one of those odd little cases in English of a word having two very common but seemingly quite different meanings. I was watching something in which someone convicted of a crime mentioned making an appeal, when I wondered: why can we also say that something is appealing to us?

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Fowl Play

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I came across an interesting mistranslation recently (well, I come across quite a few around Sicily, but you get used to the more ordinary ones after a while). Continue reading →

What it Takes

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I’ve been thinking recently of lots of the finer details of learning a second language. Maybe that’s because I’ve because I’ve been doing some speaking examining, and that really requires you to pay close attention to what people are (and aren’t!) saying. Continue reading →