So as not to upset the internet filters, I won’t put the search terms on my site, but this link shows trends in use of various words that were once clearly taboo. We seem to have cleaned up our...
Brendan Duong points me to another Google innovation, a new way of tracking mentions of words and terms in books, using the huge archive of scanned books in Google Books. It can be used to track ...
https://andrewnorton.info/2010/12/18/a-google-measure-of-ideological-fashion/
In my post-election conversations and eavesdropping I have heard several people refer to informal votes as ‘donkey votes’. In standard usage – still supported by the Macquarie Dictionary an...
Commenter Senexx today joined others who don’t think much of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. Way back in 1993 I wrote an article for the IPA Review arguing something similar. But re-readi...
https://andrewnorton.info/2010/06/23/left-and-right-not-so-useless-after-all/
Malcolm Fraser’s biography is actually called Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, but according to his biographer (or narrator, as she calls herself) Margaret Simons ‘Enduring Liberal’ w...
https://andrewnorton.info/2010/04/08/malcolm-frasers-liberalism/
At least at first glance, the draft English national curriculum released yesterday looks reasonably good. I was pleased to see specific reference to apostrophes, and encouraged by a story in this...
A CBS poll on gays in the US military finds that the American public is much happier with the idea of ‘gay men and lesbians’ serving in the military than ‘homosexuals’ serving in the mili...
https://andrewnorton.info/2010/02/14/what-a-difference-a-word-makes/
The Grattan Institute has released its first report, an analysis of student progress measures by Ben Jensen. It argues that ‘value-added’ measures – that is, how much students improve betwe...
https://andrewnorton.info/2010/01/27/the-first-grattan-institute-research-paper/
When I am in doubt about a point of style or grammar, first I always see what Pam Peters has to say. Her Cambridge Guide to English Usage miraculously foresees almost every question I want answer...
https://andrewnorton.info/2010/01/19/the-five-stages-of-language-change/
It’s turning into a bad month for conservative pundits -with first Irving Kristol and now William Safire moving from the opinion page to the obituary page. In Safire’s case, however, he will ...