Language Blog

MET workshop report

I asked ChatGPT to give me a one-paragraph summary of this workshop and it didn’t have a clue. It knew that it was held in Valencia on 21 April 2023 but got the time wrong. It had told me on the day that Tottenham had qualified for the Champions League, which would...

The enigma of had tea

Ireland greets visitors with a hundred thousand welcomes. New Rochelle NY advertises itself as The Place to Come When a Feller Needs a Friend. Happy, Texas, is The Town Without a Frown. Rather more cryptically, my home town of Edinburgh opts to suppose: “You’ll have...

The unbearable Spursiness of Hibsing it

Hibernian were my first but not my last or only love. Leaving Edinburgh as a nine-year-old meant, above all, leaving Hibs, and I wept bitter schoolboy tears. I had only just started going to matches, paying fifteen new pence in freshly-minted decimal coinage for the...

A blog on Mogg: the linguistic giveaways of a hard Brexiteer

Jacob Rees-Mogg is an elongated, nanny-fixated toff with a penchant for hard Brexit and double-breasted gentswear. His political and sartorial preferences repel me, but a language blog is not the place to critique the politics or dress sense of the pseudo-aristocratic...

The joy of German untranslatables

I always start with schadenfreude. That gets their attention. Why, I ask my brilliant German students, do we use a German word instead of an English one? Is it, as a certain sort of English person might choose to believe, that we are inherently nicer and need to...

How I stole a serial comma from the Comma Queen

Translating and editing can be solitary occupations, so translators and editors like to get together from time to time. When they do, they usually end up arguing about language. And one thing they can never agree on is the serial comma. They can’t even agree on what...