How English Became

English

Simon Horobin

Faculty of English

Tuesday 27 September 2016

The Telegraph

Lord Chesterfield

‘I hereby declare that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a freeborn British subject, to the said Mr Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship.’

Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Oxford Dictionaries Online

Waitrose

Robert Baker, Reflections on the English Language: Being a Detection of many improper Expressions used in Conversation, and of many

others to be found in Authors (1770)

Less: ‘This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but more strictly proper’.

Selfie

'A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or

webcam and shared via social media'.

• The picture is clearly not a selfie as everyone has been describing it…You can clearly see that it is not Ben who is taking the picture. He's in it but he's not taking it.

H.W. Fowler on literally

‘We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression “not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking”, we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate.’

Simon Heffer, Strictly English

• ‘An enormity is something bad, a transgression: it is not simply something big.’

• ‘One should speak not of the enormity of the task, but of its enormousness: even if one is President of the United States’.

• ‘[Carlyle] was about to embark on his first large-scale literary project, a life of Schiller, and was overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.’

‘I can choose to suppress the irritation I feel when I see, for example, a sign that reads “Potatoe’s”; I cannot choose not to feel it.’ (Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene)

Bill Bryson:

“If you remember nothing else from this book, remember at least that ‘comprised of’ is always wrong”.

Merriam-Webster

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American spellings

• disk, program

• British English disc, programme

• favorite

• dialog

• center

Emojipedia

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