Mastodawn

I’ve been noticing more novel compound words. I just saw “freewill” in a book. My 1985 Macquarie Dictionary (AU) has entries only for “free will” and “free-will”. Is this a shift of a computer age? Maybe I see these compounds most in news headlines? Checking now I see a headline about “sunscreen” - and I’m surprised to find it’s not even mentioned in my old Macquarie! Nor is “sun-block”. Another in today’s news is “ceasefire” which has a hyphen in Macquarie. I wonder if hyphens drop out over time. #EnglishUsage

Stan Carey Mar 9

Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":

"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."

¹ complain
² issue, distribute

Source and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/

#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases

Giving out, Irish style

The phrasal verb give out has several common senses: distribute – ‘she gave out free passes to the gig’ emit – ‘the machine gave out a distinctive hum’ break down, stop work…

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Stan Carey Feb 28

On the peculiarly Irish use of "grand", from Garrett's Carr's novel The Boy from the Sea

More on that usage here: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/a-grand-irish-usage/

#books #IrishBooks #reading #GarrettCarr #words #grand #EnglishUsage #Ireland #IrishEnglish

Steam Powered Frisbee 🥏Jan 27

Today someone called a layer of snow "shallow."

I don't think I've ever heard that used to describe snow. It feels wrong; even though (in the US at least) we say "deep" snow all the time. Shallow is for water, or people. Not for snow. Snow can be light or thin, but not shallow.

Do other people use this phrase? I know English is weird, but it startled me that I'd never noticed this quirk before.

#englishusage #copyediting #askmastodon #englishishard #americanenglish #BritishEnglish #irishenglish

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Stan Carey Jan 15

Missed this last month – Language Hat followed up on my post about pronoun use for animals. Lots of interesting comments: https://languagehat.com/animals-who/

#language #grammar #animals #pronouns #EnglishUsage #writing

Animals Who. : languagehat.com

Joel VanderWerf Dec 27

The collective noun suggester is suggesting that the collective noun for misheard words is: a quiver of errors.

#CollectiveNoun #EnglishUsage

Stan Carey Dec 18

Words¹ misspelled² so often, even in edited text, that my copy-editor's heart does a little happy dance when I see them spelled appropriately:

ad nauseam, complement, its, just deserts, led, minuscule, principle, supersede

¹ In a broad sense, to include phrases.
² The descriptivist in me protests the implicit judgement, but "spelled in a nonstandardized way" is on the wordy side for a throwaway Mastodon post.

#language #spelling #words #EnglishUsage #editing #copyediting #proofreading

Stan Carey Dec 15

It seems like a small thing, but I tend to notice what pronouns people use when they refer to animals. Here's a new blog post about it:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/a-list-of-animals-who/

#language #grammar #animals #pronouns #EnglishUsage #books #writing

A list of animals who

The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows th…

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