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Illustration of three dictionaries in a row.

Running Out of Words: It’s Not a Slippery Slope

January 19, 2021 | Filed under: Gael Spivak

It’s almost inevitable. People who say “we’ve gotten too PC” about language will, at some point in the discussion, claim that if we stop using certain words or phrases, we’ll run out of words to write and talk. Arriving at this spot Who is having these discussions and how does …

Illustration of 7 diverse medical professionals standing in a V-formation on a grey background.

Emergency Linguistics: The Translation of Public Health Information in Emergency Situations

August 4, 2020 | Filed under: Barbara McClintock

Every act of communication is an act of translation. Gregory Rabassa, translator of Spanish and Portuguese fiction The translation of public health information is critical in emergency situations, particularly in a country like Canada that welcomes thousands of immigrants every year whose mother tongue is not English or French. A …

Canadianisms and the Oxford English Dictionary

Survey of Canadianisms

December 10, 2019 | Filed under: Barbara McClintock

These days, language professionals in Canada are starting to turn to the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or other reference books to replace the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which is now 15 years old and not likely to be re-edited. An interesting initiative has been started at the University of Toronto …

book cover of Guide to Canadian English Usage

Vocation, Avocation: Margery Fee and Canadian Usage

July 9, 2019 | Filed under: Frances Peck

We editors have our own celebrities. At the March meeting of Editors BC, which featured Stefan Dollinger, editor-in-chief of the DCHP-2 (A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition), a name on the guest list caught my eye. Could it be? Really? It was. In the audience was Margery …

Novel Medical Treatments

June 4, 2019 | Filed under: James Harbeck

People with serious health problems are often subject to novel treatments. But that shouldn’t mean being treated like they’re in a novel. Health problems are human problems, and they can be important stories about real things affecting real people. But often, in telling them, we create another problem, because we …

The Roots of Disagreement

July 17, 2018 | Filed under: James Harbeck

It was one of those crises that end up in the parentheses of memoranda; it concerned the geneses of several referenda among alumni (and alumnæ) about addenda to their indices: the criteria for the termini of Greek- and Latin-derived words. By what formulæ should we choose, for instance, schemata or …

Do you want to use a Germanic feature, or do you prefer using a Celtic one?

April 10, 2018 | Filed under: James Harbeck

Learning other languages is fun. And to learn another language is to learn more about your own language — especially when it takes on the aspect of learning more about your family tree. You’ve probably had the experience of meeting new relatives or learning about ancestors and thinking, “Oh, that …

A Macaronic Feather in Our Cap

December 12, 2017 | Filed under: James Harbeck

English is gloriously macaronic. I don’t mean that it’s like a big bowl of elbow noodles, not exactly. But I also don’t mean that it’s like a macaron — well, maybe I do, but that’s not what the word means. Macaronic, linguistically, refers to something that’s a mixture of languages. …

Being Intercultural: The Language of Health

August 30, 2016 | Filed under: Zanne Cameron

Being intercultural is often defined strictly in terms of ethnicity and geography, when really each of us lives a multiplicity of cultural identities on a daily basis. Our interactions at work and with family and friends, our activities, faith, offline and online personas, all have their own overlapping and intersecting …

More Honoured in the Breach or the Observance?

March 1, 2016 | Filed under: James Harbeck

It is tempting to say that getting classical quotations right is more honoured in the breach than the observance. But if we did, we’d be guilty too. In the original, Hamlet is telling Horatio about the tradition of drinking sprees in the Danish court; he says it makes Danes look …

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