You don’t talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.
Category Archive: David Crystal
At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
Ever since the arrival of printing – thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people’s minds – people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people – some well-known, most totally unknown – who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
It hasn’t been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don’t have rows.
It took three years to put Shakespeare’s words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.