English Language Development Pte Ltd

16/10/2024

There has been some activity on this page in recent weeks, and while apologising for neglecting it, I would like to thank those who have shown an interest.
I hope to do a major update on it shortly, and in the meantime I hope that you will find the material which has already been posted useful 😀

10/06/2022

Just when you thought you had it all worked out 🤨

📸: Chapman's Bookery

28/12/2019

16/12/2019

I've mentioned before how the misuse or non-use of a comma can change the meaning of a sentence. The apostrophe is another punctuation mark with a lot of pitfalls. It's used either to show a letter is missing from a word - as in the 'It's' at the beginning of this sentence - or to indicate possession - 'Mary's little lamb.' This article gives an idea of the scope for incorrect usage:

The end of the Apostrophe Society has sparked debate over the modern state of grammar.

20/11/2019

How did 'OK' come into the English language? One of the most popular theories is via Boston in the USA:

"The American phrase “OK,” as in “everything is alright, I’m OK,” first appeared in common use as a result of an abbreviation fad that swept Boston in the late 1830s; OK was an abbreviation of the purposely misspelled phrase “oll korrect” (a variation of “all correct”)."

But there are other theories:

OK (spelling variations include okay, O.K., and ok) is an American English word denoting approval, acceptance, agreement, assent, acknowledgment, or a sign of indifference. OK is frequently used as a loanword in other languages. It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on....

19/10/2019

I hadn't really thought of 'The' as being particularly powerful - although it certainly gives a lot of problems to those learning English - like when to use it and when not to... and oops, there's a typo in the 'As we age...' section. Can you spot it?

How did a word which means nothing come to dominate our language?

18/10/2019

The Eskimos are supposed to have at least fifty words to describe snow. The British too like talking about the weather, but in their case it's usually rain. Here are thirteen words and phrases used to describe rainfall around the British Isles:

Fine drizzle or a wet-to-the-undies downpour, the Brits know a thing or two about rain.

17/10/2019

In June, I posted some articles on the global influences which developed English, and how it continues to develop today. Here is an account of another impact on the evolution of present-day English - the invasions of the Vikings of ancient Scandinavia, and the words that they added to the language:

The seafaring Scandinavian invaders who transformed our grammar.

16/10/2019

What, exactly, is a meme?

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. The term was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a shortened form of the Ancient Greek word mimeme. Memes, according to the study of memetics, share evolutionary traits with the biological process of evolution including mutation, variation, competition, and inheritance.

While memetic theory has been applied to everything from the examination of racism to architecture, most modern readers will be most familiar with the lighter side of memes: the replication of silly jokes and images across the internet via discussion forums and content sharing websites.

Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is fa...

15/10/2019

Every language has it's own idioms - the expressions which have a lot more meaning than the words themselves, and can be difficult to understand. Sometimes these idioms vary from place to place, which can make them even more confusing. Here's a look at eight which are quite common in English - and the reasoning behind them:

An assortment of our most intriguing idioms, their possible origins and how to use them.