Ahoy there, ye scurvy swabs. Many of ye, me hearties, will already know that it be International Talk Like A Pirate Day today where ye has to talk in the pirate lingo as much as is possible. Anyone failin’ to talk like a proper swashbucklin’ buccaneer will find themselves consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker after [...]

The way in which we use language is important. It not only enables us to communicate ideas, and determines how effectively those ideas are communicated, but it also allows people to judge us. Now I am a firm believer in that the most important thing is whether or not you communicate your message effectively, but [...]

The Local Government Association (LGA) would like to see some of the above words (‘blue-sky’) etc banned from council use, having sent out a list of 200 words and phrases to councils around the country that they would really rather they didn’t use. For the most part this appears to be because they are in [...]

There are some words you just don’t use in conversation. This post is going to discuss them. If you are likely to be offended by them, when used in context about the use of language (as opposed to them being used as a slur), then you might not want to read on. Oh, yeah, and [...]

Although “when censors go bad” sounds like it will be some sort of crap documentary due to appear on Channel 5 at any moment now, it’s is always somewhere between farcical, comical, and tragic when attempts to censor something cock up badly. For example, The American Family Association don’t like the word ‘gay’. They instead [...]

Well, according to the Facebook application ‘Word Challenge’, I am anyway. Those of you who know me know I like word games, so when I found a little application on Facebook where it gives you six letters and you’ve got to make as many words out of that as possible to score points, I was [...]

…no, this isn’t the cue for some sort of set of racist jokes about how “all them foreigners talk funny, don’t they”, it’s an idea for a blog post. Basically, the idea is to write a blog post for Sunday 1st June — about whatever it is I would fancy writing about in a particular [...]

According to the NCC, software licences are unfair, partly because they’re virtually incomprehensible, and partly because you don’t get a chance to see what the conditions for using the product are until after you’ve bought it. Well of course that’s unfair. I said exactly that about 18 months ago when I launched my personal campaign [...]

Last year I wrote a post (for St George’s day) called For England and St George!. I’m tempted immediately to re-hash it in the light of The Goldfish’s recent post on Britishness. But that wouldn’t do The Goldfish’s post the credit it deserves, so instead I’ll just re-hash the title! The Goldfish feels that the [...]

Okay, some of you might remember that a few weeks ago I mentioned a hypothetical situation involving a 5-a-side team which lost 22-0. Well, after that game, they got a proper goalkeeper, and lost the next match 5-1 before winning their third 6-4. Unfortunately, this hypothetical team’s entirely hypothetical goalkeeper then picked up rather too [...]