I love language. This does not mean words. I quite like a lot of words. I
don't much like funny, quirky, or just plain made-up words; I infinitely prefer
wind, water, west, wild, wise, window, woodbank, wood anemone to a bunch of fake phobias. By 'word' here I will always mean "
lexical item"; these sometimes contain spaces in the spelling or are syntactically composite.
When I give citations I like to use the complete sentence, for context and out of respect for the author's style.
My phonetic transcriptions are in
IPA. (They were in
SAMPA at first but I've now written a SAMPA-to-IPA macro.) Transcriptions are in slashes because it's too much bother to code square brackets.
Other abbreviations or symbols used:
BNC =
British National Corpus
BrE = British English (in the sense of a written form; it is meaningless to apply this term to speech varieties)
CGEL =
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language—if you're not using this, your understanding of grammar is out of date.
Gh = Google hit (and thus also kGh, MGh)
OED =
Oxford English Dictionary – I always use the full on-line one, via UK public library subscription. Learn
how the OED find out the meaning of words.
Cited words are in 'single quotes', meanings in "double quotes".
Qroqqa is the Maltese word for "brooding hen". The 'q' is a glottal stop. (Ack! I've just discovered the Hawaiian for "
ooaa" has more glottal stops in it than my username!)
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your citations and contributions to this site and I'm glad you're here.
For the record, qroqqa is about the only Maltese word I know.
Time for a cookie! Perhaps a Maltese treat for us here?
Hi qroqqa. I'd appreciate a Maltese miaow here.
qroqqa, thank you for your help on the braggadocio recipe. Can I just ask you to use a narrower definition of "English word"? Risotto and espresso are Italian, Morocco is a country, and Lobelia is borrowed from the scientific name.
I can't believe no wasn't there yet!
Thank you!
Yay! You know, there is a secret subgroup of biologists here on Wordie. But it's so secret that I can't talk about it.