John Williams, Linguist
@lexicoj0hn
Retired lexicographer and academic, most recently at the University of Portsmouth. Committed trade unionist. I mostly post about things I know about or am good at. If I stray into other areas, it's usually because there's a language angle.
Graduation ceremonies all this week. A local shop has set up this blackboard message. Something not quite rite about the spelling though. Attendees at #EnglishGrammarDay last month will understand why I posted this 😉@tomfreeman.bsky.social @englishgrammar.bsky.social
Southsea's Canoe Lake is practically drying up, and it looks like there's some kind of algae infestation too
England practising some bewildering changes of formation in an attempt to outfox this evening's opponents #ENG-NOR
Attended an interesting workshop the other day, led by Anne-Kathrin Reck, inspired by Engeström’s Activity System Theory. We had to model an aspect of our HE professional practice using a triangle diagram with nodes and connections. 'Exit from system' can apply to my students or to me very soon!
Heh, heh ... Great minds. I posted this a while ago. The painting is Portsmouth Dockyard by James Tissot, 1877
That damn'd seal. It barketh all night and keepeth me awake
#UxbridgeEnglishDictionary SYCOPHANT: revulsion at one member of a duo of TV presenters
Been marking, in Chrome / TurnItIn, a dissertation in which the student discusses the language used by the Marriott Bonvoy hotel chain. Lo and behold, in my *Firefox* landing page ads...
From the land of Hattie Carroll and William Zanziger. 🎵 Now ain't the time for your tiers 🎵
Attended a brilliant talk yesterday by the philosopher and political scientist @leaypi.bsky.social . Her theme was 'dignity' - in short supply at the moment. Pleased to get the opportunity to talk to her afterwards too
I give you Joseph Priestley, the founder of the Royal Society:
This was the sign for a menswear shop in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Sad to hear of the death of Tom Georgeson, one of Liverpool's finest actors. He was always popping up on TV, but he will be best remembered as 'Dixie' Dean in the 1980s series Boys from the Blackstuff, dramatizing the ravages of unemployment in the Thatcher era
The aliens will obviously have a very different counting system from our own
#linguistics #langsky Relatively rare sighting of 'owing to', in the Guardian's football columns. Until about the 1850s, 'owing to' and 'due to' happily coexisted in their own syntactic spaces, but 'owing to' has gradually been squeezed out by its pushier cousin: books.google.com/ngrams/graph...
Personally I'd prefer a decent salary increase, a lighter workload, and a proper say in decision-making, but hey what do I know
From a review of Ali Smith's latest novel. I admire the reviewer's attempt to find some symbolism in the names of the two main characters. But it's also worth pointing out that these were the names of the Blue Peter dogs when I was a child. (Petra was Patch's mother.)
Reposting these Stolpersteine on #HolocaustMemorialDay . I saw them outside an apartment block in Trieste, opposite the city's synagogue, which even today is guarded day and night. By Aug 1944 the Nazis were in full retreat but still considered it a priority to deport an 8-year-old boy to Auschwitz