“Pun”ctuation and grammar

A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly. A bar was walked into by the passive voice. Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.” A question mark walks into a bar? A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then […]

Mistranslated text, misspellings and bad grammar

All three of the above can be found in the murky world of the tattoo parlour. A professional translation service recently launched a “Think Before You Ink” campaign to cut down the number of terrible tattoo travesties. One man wanted to show the world how “awesome” but he ended up “awsome” instead. A young lad […]

Dead words

A couple of days ago someone wrote to me and asked if I had heard of ‘Corpus Linguistics’.  The first thing that popped into my head was “dead words”.  (Corpus – corpse / linguistics – words).  In my mind’s eye I saw a load of words lying around, unloved and unused, dying or dead.   […]