Today while exploring Douglas Head, an rocky headland just south of Douglas, I came across a sign that explained that the area was developed for ramblage and recreation, and other things, in the 1870s. The word ramblage attracted my attention as I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe it’s an old version of rambling. Have you heard it before?

There are quite a few words describe the action of moving along on foot, including walk, ramble, amble, hike, ambulate, march, wander, shuffle, perambulate, plod, run, saunter, stride, stroll, trudge and tramp. I’ve read that in some languages, such as Spanish and French, verbs of motion don’t usually indicate the manner of motion. Is this true of other languages?

One of the seminars I went to this week was on innovation in London English. One interesting point noticed by the researchers was the range of quotatives being used. Quotatives are words and expressions used to introduce reported speech, including “I said” and “she went”.

The most common quotative among young Londoners is “be like”, as in “I was like”, “he was like”, etc. This expression is used with reported speech, and also with sounds and facial expressions indicating different moods and attitudes. There are apparently equivalents of it in many other languages.

A new quotative they found being used in London was “This is me” / “This was me”. I haven’t heard this being used anywhere, have you?

How do you introduce reported speech?

Thetatismus is apparently a term used in speech therapy to describe the inability to pronounce one or both of the dental fricatives: /θ/ as in three, and /ð/, as in these.

I came across it in Anthony Burgess’s book A Mouthful of Air – Language, Languages … Especially English.

So now I know what I ’suffered’ from when I was a lad – I couldn’t pronounce /θ/ and didn’t know there was a difference between /θ/ and /f/, so didn’t distinguish between three and free. I also substituted /v/ for /ð/ when it appeared in the middle of words. Even now pronouncing /θ/ is not entirely natural for me and I tend to say /f/ instead when I’m not concentrating.

I came across today’s word, iff, in the syntax textbook I’m reading at the moment (Introduction to Government and Binding Theory). When I spotted it I thought at first that it was a typo, but have since discovered that it is used in logic to mean “if and only if”.

Iff can also be represented by the following symbols: ↔, ⇔ or ≡

Quite a few other symbols are used in logic, and to some extent in linguistics textbooks on semantics and syntax. They include:

⇒ / → / ⊃ = if … then
¬ / ˜ = not
⊕ / ⊻ = xor (exclusive or)
∀ = for all/any/each
∃ = there exists
⊢ = infers or is derived from

I vaguely remember learning some of these in maths classes many moons ago and still haven’t quite recovered! I tend to skip parts of books and articles that use them.

Source: Wikipedia

At the end of the day I personally think it’s not rocket science, and at this moment in time and with all due respect, it absolutely shouldn’t of been a 24/7 nightmare that’s fairly unique.

What on earth am I on about? Well the above sentence contains the top ten most overused phrases in English, according to this blog post. The phrases are listed below in descending order of usage.

1. At the end of the day
2. Fairly unique
3. I personally
4. At this moment in time
5. With all due respect
6. Absolutely
7. It’s a nightmare
8. Shouldn’t of (for shouldn’t have)
9. 24/7
10. It’s not rocket science

These phrases all come from the Oxford English Corpus and the list was compiled by scholars at Oxford University.

Do you use/avoid these phrases? Are there other phrases that you think are overused?

The term optionulsory was coined by one of my classmates the other day to refer to things that are somewhere between optional and compulsory – in this case the Linguistics Circle Research Seminars. Linguistics postgrads are expected and encouraged to attend these seminars, but are not absolutely obliged to do so.

I went to one of the seminars on Wednesday – quite an interesting talk on Spanish verbs which focused particularly on the preterite tense.