Jacinta Parsons suffers the consequences of some wicked wordplay with her daughter. “Can you say Bubonic Plague?” I asked, pointing to a picture of a rat-type character in my two-year-old daughter’s storybook. Without hesitation, she began attempting the four-syllable historical reference to her once innocent rat....
Kids have a tendency to give our language a whole new meaning, writes Donna Reis. At my children’s primary school back in 2011, maths lessons are gay. Salami sandwiches are gay. Ironically, boys playing with girls in the playground is gay. In the late seventies, when I...
Lucinda McKnight looks at War, social media and the urgent need to update how we teach English The war in Ukraine is being described as the first social media war, even as “the TikTok war”. Memes, tweets, videos and blog posts communicate both vital information...
Sue Ollerhead reports why all teachers need to teach language and literacy, not just English teachers Proposed changes to the New South Wales English syllabus reinforce the misguided idea that the teaching of language and literacy skills should fall chiefly to English teachers, leaving other teachers...
Things are really jeffed up for Karens right now, write linguists Howard Manns and Kate Burridge The Miley (“coronavirus”) did a Melba (“made yet another a comeback”), and Joe and Jane Bloggs are being drongos. In the process, “Karen” has become the Bradman of ways for calling...
Fiction authors are pretty good at writing sentences with striking images, worded just the right way. Writes Brett Healey We might suppose the images are striking because the author has a striking imagination. But the words seem just right because the author also has a large...
After 20 years of teaching academic writing to both native speakers and English language learners, writes Laurie Ann Britt-Smith, I can attest that at some point, just about everyone asks me why, or even whether, grammar matters. There is more than one way to define grammar....
