There has been much cackling among media types about Telegraph editor Simon Heffer's email to his staff, complaining about errors in the newspaper. The Guardian, with considerable Schadenfreude, stuck the whole thing on their website, and you can read it here if you so wish.

He starts off fairly reasonably highlighting some basic spelling mistakes ( Read more... )

Because I spent my formative years wandering half-drunk around as many foreign countries as I could get to, I have always loved books and poems about travel and what it means.  One of the reasons I fell so hugely in love with Old English when I first started learning it is that they kept alive this Germanic heroic tradition of deep metaphysical ( Read more... )

Researching yet another tiresome argument with some grammar maven who objected to less being used to mean fewer, I was interested (though not surprised) to see that this common “mistake” has a pedigree going all the way back to Old English. According to the OED, it “originates from the OE. construction of lǽs adv. (quasi-n.) with a partitive ( Read more... )

I am having one of my periodic attempts to learn some German.  I don't know what it is, the language just seems to slide off me like oil.  So I've been going through some of Rilke's sonnets with a dictionary.  As always, I spend most of the time obsessing over how similar all the words I don't understand are to Old English equivalents.  The first ( Read more... )

I have become suddenly very excited by a set of noun/verb correspondences that I'd genuinely never noticed before.  All of them come from Old English, where c sounded soft (/tʃ/) before an e, but hard (/k/) before an a.  These nouns all ended in -ce, but the verbs took the usual OE verb ending -an, which made the c hard.  The sound differences have ( Read more... )

I am feeling so incredibly frustrated at the moment! It's been weeks since I picked up a camera and filmed anything, or wrote anything for that matter. My Muse has deserted me and I can never remember how to get the inspiration back, except it's something to do with getting lost or staying up too late. Bah. I thought I had mastered the trick of ( Read more... )