Category: Languages
-
Literally robust
I enjoyed reading John Sutherland's article in G2 today as I ate my lunchtime sandwich, How language is literally losing its meaning, occasioned by the admission to the Oxford English Dictionary of the abuse of the word literally to add vague emphasis to a statement. He also inveighs against the misuse of robust. A few minutes later,…
-
Titles and forms of address
‘F— off, grandad!’, yelled an aggressive young man with a bicycle at me at Clapham Junction station the other day. It is, I think, the first time I have been called that, but since I am now over half-way through my sixtieth decade, I should not complain. It set me thinking about the modes of…
-
Le Monde on Google Books
As a way of keeping my knowledge of French alive, I read Le Monde on Fridays, a day chose beacuse it’s the day for Le Monde des Livres, the book reviews. In today’s I was startled to see Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian in the first paragraph of an article on Google Books. It’s interesting…
-
On cagmag
I bought some Christmas pudding yesterday, from the brewers Harveys of Lewes, on the recommendation of someone whose taste is as refined and reliable in puddings as it is in literature. I remembered that, in my childhood, Christmas pudding was served not only at Christmas, but on birthdays too, and was always known, in the…
-
Base Patrimoine
One of the things I enjoy most about my current job is when I discover resources such as this, which I spotted from a post to the French Studies Libraries Group e-mail list by Teresa Vernon of the French Collections at the British Library. She describes the Catalogue Collectif de France, the CCF, (not the…
-
WESLINE colloquium: Exploding the Canon
I attended the WESLINE Colloquium, Exploding the Canon. From Medieval Romance to TV Soap:meeting the challenges in resource provision on 12 September at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies. David Pearson, Director, University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS) drew attention in his welcoming remarks to the problems libraries face. All University of London…
-
Dearing review
The final report of the Dearing review of modern languages teaching in schools has been published.For a synopsis of the recommendations see the Language Learning Centre blog, where you will also find links to press coverage and discussion of the report on blogs.
-
Heuristics and the OED
In my Greek class yesterday we discussed accentuation and breathings and our tutor Vicki Roupa mentioned the verb ἑυρίσκω, I discover or find out, as an example of a rough breathing over a diphthong. The English word heuristics is derived from it, she said. Heuristics is a word whose meaning I have never fully…
-
The Ides of March are come…
…though today is really the Calendae or Calends. But the Dearing review of modern languages was to have reported "by the end of February". There’s nothing on Teachernet, where the interim report appeared last December.