Great, short piece on the English accent as it existed in 1776: I’d always assumed that Americans used to have accents similar to today’s British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same. Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents [...]
Good web software has a lot of upsides: speed, compatibility, network awareness and seemless updates. Those seemless updates have a downside, though. I use Google Maps three or four times a week. I also live in Japan. Until Saturday, when viewing Google Maps in English, the application displayed placed names in both kanji and romaji. [...]
The OED lists woah as a variant of woa which is a variant of whoa, which is a variant of the interjection who (not to be confused with the pronoun who–the interjection is pronounced as wo–which is also a variant of all these), which came into the language as a variant of ho! Here are [...]
OK, I don’t get it. The issue of an apology being offered by the Federal Government of the Commonwealth of Australia to Indigenous Australians is in the news again and all I seem to see are people arguing either that we do have a personal responsibility to the past or that we don’t. You have [...]
So I’ve transitioned across to Windows Live Writer to write blog posts (I know, it felt wrong, too) but I must admit: this is a really solid product. In fact the only thing that frustrated me was being forced to use American English in the spellchecker. A quick hunt with Google revealed a bunch of [...]