Top Ten British Words 2 (according to Merriam-Webster)

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary have issued a second set of ten British words they like. This has given me the impetus / excuse to do another little exercise, this time in the guise of a very short story. It's meant to be quite colloquial, so don't take it as an example of excellent English to follow.

Lesson on intensifiers

I've noticed that a few people who have googled "intensifiers" have landed up on a post I wrote some time ago about "ridiculously". And I imagine they've felt rather disappointed, as it didn't say much about other intensifiers, just defended the use of ridiculously.

So here, to make amends, is the real McCoy, a lesson on intensifiers.

• The basics - gradable and non-gradable adjectives
• Collocations - adverbs with adjectives
• Collocations - adverbs with verbs
• Collocations - adjectives with nouns
• Intensifying with so and such
• Intensifying with well

Sorry for buggering up the commas post

An apology and a quiz

Update: commas quiz now works OK

A couple of weekends ago, I wrote what I thought was a really neat program, to test a theory I had about the use of commas. That is, that they almost always denote a pause. I spent all of Saturday writing the program, and it worked perfectly on a normal web page on my browser. So, feeling rather pleased with myself, I then wrote the text for my commas post.

On Sunday I started 'translating' the Javascript program for Blogger, which is a bit of a bugger. You have to change parts of the code, known as 'entities', which I'd already learnt the hard way that you had to do, so I wasn't expecting much trouble. But when I posted the blog, and clicked on the relevant button - nothing. 'Bugger!', I thought, and spent a couple of hours trying to find the problem. The real bugger is that to try it out on a normal web page you have to translate it back again, and so forth and so on.