Australia disgraced itself a fortnight ago, or rather Kevin Rudd’s new government did, although as his move to outsource asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea seems a surefire vote-winner there’s plenty of blame to go round. I railed impotently in a Metafilter thread about the move, and figure I may as well reproduce that impotence here. What follows are my (edited) comments from the thread. Although I started out writing about the country in the third person, I switched to “we” and “our”, even though I’m not living there now, because using “over there” language in this context felt wrong.
Read More · 31 July 2013 · Politics
A post at Laughing Squid introduced me to Joshua Katz’s U.S. Dialect Maps, based on data from a survey conducted by Bert Vaux of Cambridge University. Laughing Squid highlighted some favourite topics, like the soda, pop and coke divide, but the ones that really got me were the totally unexpected handful below...
Read More · 31 July 2013 · Words
Although this blog may look more moribund than it has for a while, for the past month there’s been a reason for it...
Read More · 23 July 2013 · Site News