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A blog about English language use, publishing and the media in general – brought to you by a sub-editor (copy editor) on a weekly UK magazine and his former chief sub.
If you have a question about vocabulary, grammar or punctuation, why not ask
Recent Posts Tagged With 'spelling'
Spelling: \'Sameday disptach\'
At the weekend I went to order a particular product from the Amazon website. But I hit a problem: the product in question was available from a number of sellers, all of whom had almost identical prices, ratings and returns policies. I'd never used - ...
'Swedes miss Capri after GPS gaffe'
I meant to blog about this news story when I first saw it, a couple of weeks back:Swedes miss Capri after GPS gaffeIt begins:A Swedish couple in search of the isle of Capri drove to Carpi, an industrial town in northern Italy, because they misspelt t...
To demagogue
A while back my colleague Sue emailed me to say:Pres Obama referred to "demagoging" in his interview on the Today programme this morning - I haven't looked it up but surely there's no verb 'to demagogue'?Well, I've just looked it up and not only is s...
Mnemonics: licences and licensing
Where I work, a lot of our news stories concern licences and licensing. In British English, as I'm sure you know, the former is spelt with a 'c' after the 'n', while the latter is spelt with an 's' after the 'n'.(American English simplifies the whole...
Word of the day: pixelation/pixilation
My version of Microsoft Word automatically changes 'pixelation' to 'pixilation'. That's annoying, but it's also interesting – for three reasons.1. Word doesn't automatically correct 'pixelate' to 'pixilate'. Why the inconsistency?2. In contrast to ...
