author |ˈôTHər|(abbr.: auth. ) noun a writer of a book, article, or report: he is the author of several books on the subject. • someone who writes books as a profession: my favourite authors are Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley. • the writings of such a person: I had to read authors I disliked. • …
As the famous Sri Lankan expression goes, ‘Today is lazy day’. So in keeping with this spirit, I have decided to be completely slothic for today’s blog post and entertain you instead with a list of wonderfully awful translations that I found while surfing the net over my morning coffee. In a Tokyo Hotel: Is …
For some odd reason, I started searching for the longest sentence ever written in English and was amazed to find that in fact, a sentence of 469,375.2 words was actually written by Nigel Tomm in a book titled The Blah Story that had twenty-three different covers, which must surely be a record for covers and words, although …
As many of my readers already know, my assistant, editor, ideas man and general factotum around my little writing abode is Yalla, my English Cocker Spaniel and man about town and cafés. While his job description remains a little vague, it does seem that sleeping forms a major part of his work day. Perhaps all …
Writing always seems to be such a serious business. Novels, articles, technical documents, journalism plus one hundred other serious applications of this worthiest of arts. Being a pedantic member of the grammar police and spelling firing squad, I also take my métier very seriously. Paying strict attention to my use of each part of speech in its …
For those readers who may not know, I actually do something other than ramble on about things that annoy me and scribble out books and poetry. In fact my principal activity is as an English teacher. Not your Shakespeare and Keats English Lit teacher, but a teacher of ESOL. That translates to English as a Second Operating …
For those of you who are scribblers, do you ever stop and consider what verbs you are using? Or do you think about what verbs you are using? It is easy to surmise that verbs as grammatical, but I prefer to perceive them as vocabulary. I receive many emails each day and I get a load more …
Calling myself The Vandal was a bit of fun many moons ago that probably arose as a result of an excess of cheap red wine. A joke about my bad spelling and a chronic yet imaginative use of the grammatical negative. In such a state, it was easy to think that I had some ability with words. …
When I formed my publishing company (Portmanteau Press LLC), I was shocked and appalled that I received the following question from numerous people (my CPA, the lady at the bank, my mother!): what is a portmanteau? Now, I feel the need to educate people about this wonderful language device. Being that Derek’s blog is called …
Inside is the opposite if outside. Logically. So, the opposite of hangover must be hangunder then? And the positive of disappointed is appointed? The ‘un’ and ‘um’ prefixes are easier though. Simply a matter of sound, phonetics and clear logic. An umbrella can’t be an umbrella now can it? And umbridge is not a hesitation in crossing …
It may come as a surprise to learn that the English language contains some complexity. We are always told that it is a rather simple language as it has no masculine, feminine or neuter to worry about. Neither does it have special grammatical structures such as the subjunctive in French or the accusative and dative …
My recent post gave you a small example of what is expected of an advanced learner of English. So today I thought I would up the difficulty level by giving you a sample of the expectations of the proficiency level. So have fun seeing how good your English really is. For questions 1-15, read the …
