The Better English category features all blog posts related to improving your English. There are tips on spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation.
Unlawful versus Illegal.
In the office recently we had a discussion around the two terms. In relation to a recent political decision around Brexit in the UK, Boris Johnson’s actions were said to be unlawful. What does that mean?
Here’s a quick puzzle for you to test your English. Can you work it out?
The STAR Team
Share it with your friends with the links below.
Go-on, you know you want to.
Today is Friday the 13th, one of the unluckiest days of the year in the Western world. The fear of the number 13 —triskaidekaphobia — goes back to Mediaeval times when the story of the Last Supper and crucifixion of Jesus Christ became commonplace among religious scholars.
Although Friday and the number 13 were both considered unlucky, the two together were never seen as extraordinarily unlucky by the superstitious.
It’s not quite known how the unlucky number 13 and Friday converged to become synonymous with fear and dread, but it wasn’t heard of before the nineteenth century. Paraskevidekatriaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th may attribute its origin to Thomas W. Lawson’s popular novel Friday, The Thirteenth, published in 1907. In it, an unscrupulous broker takes advantage of the superstition to create a Wall Street panic on the day. Thanks Thomas!
Others have suggested that the unholy day has its origin in a list of disasters and catastrophes that have occurred. Below are some of the more memorable ones.
Many other horror stories have made headlines around the world that affirm our worst fears surrounding this day.
Albeit, in Italy, the number 13 is known to bring good fortune; it’s Friday the 17th when Italians are most superstitious. This phobia has its origins in the Roman numeral for 17: XVII; however, when shuffled they read VIXI, meaning ‘I have lived’; this implies that death is present.
Despite this old myth, young Italians have been Americanized by popular culture that they now regard Friday the 13th as equally dreadful.
Share your horror stories with us in the comments.
The STAR Team
Sometime in the 1930s, an American mathematician, Edward Kasner, was walking his nephews along the New Jersey Palisades when he asked them to help him name a particularly long number in an effort to pique their interest in mathematics. One nephew, nine-year-old Milton suggested “googol”. But it wasn’t until 1940 that the word was first introduced in a non-technical publication surveying the field of mathematics: Mathematics and the Imagination.
A googol is one followed by a hundred zeros or as follows.
1.0 x 10100
Milton also suggested googolplex; larger than a googol, “but still finite” as Kasner was quick to remark.
Yes, the Internet search giant falls into place here. It is known that the name Google came from a misspelling of googol. Googleplex, the headquarters of Google in California is similarly derived from googolplex!
Googolplex can be written as follows:
10 x 10googol or 10(10100)
To put it into perspective, a googol is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Source: Googolplexian.com
The word posh has been in use in modern English since the 1910s. There is a story, that tells of well-to-do passengers who travelled between England and India had the word POSH written next to their names on bookings. POSH apparently stood for ‘Port Out, Starboard Home‘. The concept behind it was that the more desirable cabins were on the port side (left) which was the shady part of the ship and starboard (right side) travelling back to England.
POSH has its beginnings as an abbreviation, but the research team at the Oxford English Dictionary could not find any evidence of this; the researchers searched shipping company documents and even interviewed former travellers and found no evidence of its use.
What is also interesting is that the word had been in use for some twenty years until the story of its origins came into light in the 1930s. While the story is intriguing, it has yet to be proven and so far, it has been debunked. Oh dear!
Graham,
The STAR Team
Source: OED, Oxford English Dictionary Language Resources
We’re continuing our Better English blog with the Magic E. Also known as a silent E. This important and popular vowel can change the sound of other vowels, thus lengthening the sound of a word.
If a word ends with a vowel and then a consonant, adding the letter E at then end can change the sound of the previous vowel. The Magic E changes the sound and meaning of a word, yet remains silent. For instance: by changing the sound from short: tap, to a long vowel sound: tape.
We’ve got some examples of words ending with E.
| WORD | ENDING WITH E |
|---|---|
| On | One |
| Hat | Hate |
| Bit | Bite |
| Cub | Cube |
| Breath | Breathe |
| Tap | Tape |
| Cod | Code |
| Slim | Slime |
| Win | Wine |
| Sit | Site |
| Quit | Quite |
Academics refer to the silent E as a marker, which means it doesn’t represent a sound but tells us the sounds of the other letters in the word. A marker makes the nearest vowel to it say its name — its alphabet name — A E I O U.
But there are always exceptions to every rule, especially in the English language.
It would seems like the academics who added the Magic E to lengthen the sound forgot about the old words above.
If you think we’ve left any words out of our lists, or just want to show us how much you know, then let us know in the comments below.
The STAR Team
Q is one of the trickier letters to learn about in English spelling, as it’s often confused with C and K in phonetics. Here are the Q spelling rules to help you use it correctly and improve your spelling in the English language.
The letter Q is always followed by the letter U; at the start of a word, or after an S; it makes a sound like KW…
Some words end with QUE — these words with QU make a K like sound.
These examples come from our Spelling Rules game, which helps improve your spelling skills. It was designed to help people with dyslexia improve their spelling in English. The game Spelling Rules created by Claire McNelis as part of her Master’s thesis in Digital Media at NUI, Galway. She wanted to create an application that would teach spelling rules in a way that was simple and accessible for dyslexic people.
Play the game for free by selecting the letter Q at the beginning. There are other games available too.
The STAR Team
New Words in English Enter OED, 2015
The OED, otherwise known as the Oxford English Dictionary, has recently announced 500 new words and over 900 newly revised and updated words that will be added.
Seems like there are so many that it’s almost impossible to imagine. However, many of the newly updated ones are new senses of the word, go, with about 603. Gosh! Although it’s 51 senses fewer than the longest OED entry, run, according to the OED itself.
One to make headlines though is twerk: a blend of of twitch or twist and jerk. Twitter almost exploded when it was revealed that twerk was, in fact, a pre-existing word — describing a dance that emphasizes the performer’s posterior, it has its roots in the early 1990s New Orleans ‘bounce’ music scene.
Twerk goes back farther to its first possible usage in 1820 when it was spelled as twirk: referring to a twisting movement; a twitch. Then it reemerged in 1848 and again in 1901 when it was spelled the way we known it today. Its origin in unclear but the OED believe its influence is from quirk and work “in reference to the dance”.
We’ll cut to the chase and list ones already known, fo’ shizzle!
Along with guerrilla, that has already been established in the Dictionary here are some other phrases incorporating this compound word:
Then there’s that one we “slipped in” — fo’ shizzle (adjective), a slang term originated in the language of rap and hip-hop (2001) and means ‘for sure’.
Others:
Check out the OED’s other new entries such as cisgender and intersectionality, fo’ shizzle! OK — it’s out of my system now.
Graham,
The STAR Team
For every jot and tittle in life, there’s an app! Tittle: I really like the sound of this word although I don’t remember the last time I used it. It’s fallen into an abyss where words go because they sound a tad dated. Perhaps the younger generation has never even heard it. You never know though; it sounds like it could be the name of an upcoming app and the word itself is slingshot back into modern usage.
The OED states the meaning of tittle, a singular noun as a tiny amount or part of something. Although there is another meaning of tittle! One I never knew until now. The tittle, or the superscript dot, is the distinguishing mark that appears above both lowercase i and j in writing and print. Yes, there’s a word for those small dots. Amazing!
Tittle, as a word, has its roots in Late Middle English where it originated from the Latin titulus: small stroke or accent. Tittle is rarely used in modern English and its first known use was recorded in the Christian Bible (Matthew 5:18).
Hold on! I thought the tittle was a diacritic.
The tittle is also referred to as a diacritic, but this is a broader term as diacritics can appear on other letters in the alphabet. This is true for many European languages where diacritics appear as accents, macrons and graves over both vowels and consonants like these guys here: ä, ë, İ, ė, á, â.
There are several languages that use both the dotted and dotless I in uppercase and lowercase. Modern Turkish uses both dotted (İ i) and dotless (I, ı) as well as Azerbaijani and the Tatar language.
In Irish, bilingual road signs show the dotless lowercase ı to distinguish it from the buailte overdot that appears over consonants: ġ, ċ. Nowadays, an h replaces the diacritic and is thus written as gh and ch.
In some of the Dene group of languages from the Northwest Territories in Canada, both dotted and dotless I are used to distinguish the differences between tone-marked vowels, like í and ì. And in the French speaking province of Quebec in Canada, there are road signs that show the uppercase I with a tittle rendering one such place, Longueuil as LONGUEUİL.
There’s got to be some brands out there that use dotless I in their designs, fonts and logos. If you come across any, please do leave a comment below.
The STAR Team
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