McKean's Law: Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error. —VERBATIM, 2001
Can native speakers of a language make mistakes? —Allen Walker Read
Useful Links
Johnson from
The Economist about the
effects the use/abuse of language have on politics, society and culture
around the world
On Language from
The
New York Times, and check out
Posts
published by Philip B. Corbett of the same paper.
The Word
Columnists from the Boston Globe
by Jan Freeman
A Way with Words, public
radio's lively language show, with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett
'Do You Speak American?'
a PBS documentary
World Wide Words Michael
Quinion writes on international English from a British viewpoint and his
Dictionary of Affixes
A Barrel Full of Words,
a look at American word humor
Engrish for your dairy life.
Non-native speakers beware - you may not like this site. The revenge is Hanzi
Smatter
Word Court wherein
verbal virtue is rewarded, crimes against the language are punished, and
poetic justice is done
The Purdue Online Writing Lab
(OWL) Writing and Teaching Writing, Grammar and Mechanics, Style
Guides, ESL ...
National Grammar Day is March
4, designated by the Society for the
Promotion of Good Grammar and MSN
Encarta
Grammar Girl's weekly
broadcast: Quick and
Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Wordorigins.org is devoted to the
origins of words and phrases, or as a linguist would put it, to etymology
The American Dialect Society's
2010 Word of the Year is “app”
Urban Dictionary: the open
source glossary of slang that gives you the down low on current vocabulary
trends
Word frequency lists and
dictionary of contemporary American English
Double-Tongued Dictionary
records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English
The Eggcorn Database devoted to
collecting the kind of unusual English spellings that have come to be
called eggcorns
Word Fugitives a word fugitive is a wanted word or expression, one
that someone has been unable to call to mind
Free Searchable Language Databases
MICASE Michigan Corpus of Academic
Spoken English is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed
speech from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, created by
researchers and students at the U-M English Language Institute (ELI)
COCA
the Corpus of Contemporary American English is the largest
freely-available corpus of English. COCA is also related to other
large corpora that have been created or modified, including the British
National Corpus and the 100 million word TIME
Corpus (1920s-2000s)
The International Corpus of English
(ICE) began in 1990 with the primary aim of collecting material for
comparative studies of English worldwide. Twenty research teams around the
world are preparing electronic corpora of their own national or regional
variety of English. Each ICE corpus consists of one million words of
spoken and written English produced after 1989.
VOICE
is based on audio-recordings of 151 naturally-occurring, non-scripted,
face-to-face interactions involving 753 identified individuals from 49
different first language backgrounds using English as a lingua franca
(ELF), i.e. English used as a common means of communication among speakers
from different first-language backgrounds
Noam Chomsky Arnold M. Zwicky Steven Pinker Geoffery K. Pullum Daniel L. Everett