Random thoughts on the expression vanishingly unlikely

At language blog The Stroppy Editor, Tom Freeman takes the Guardian to task for the way it treats part of a submission (for a government consultation process on child poverty) from a team led by Alan Milburn, "ex-Labour minister turned coalition adviser":

(the submission) adds: "It now seems vanishingly unlikely [sic] that this government will hit the targets in the Child Poverty Act."

By adding the expression [sic] after vanishingly unlikely, either the writer or a sub-editor seemed to be suggesting that these words contained an error of some sort, either grammatical or spelling.

Some random thoughts on different to

If you're a foreign learner looking for advice as to what preposition to use after different, I'd recommend using from; that way you won't tread on anybody's toes. You can read more about the use of different and easily confusable words such as other and next here. That advice, however, turns out to be more of a case of 'do what the teacher says' rather than what the teacher does.

This post brings together information from dictionaries and usage guides, a few statistics, as well as examples from the press and a few books. There are also some links to linguistics books that discuss the question.

Expressions with All but, none but, but for etc

You might occasionally come across sentences like these:

• The party was all but over when we arrived.
• All but one of the plates were damaged

The expression all but has a couple of different uses, and from what I've seen on language forums, this can give even native speakers some problems, so in this post we'll look at this plus a couple of other expressions with but.

Random-ised thoughts - Tristram Shandy, -ize and -ise verbs

This is part of an investigation I've been doing into the use and spelling of -ize suffix verbs and their spelling (-ize or -ise) in British English. For more details, related posts and the methods I've used, see the -ize / -ise page.

Thackeray's use of -ise/-ize verbs in Vanity Fair

In which I list all the instances of this type of verb in Mr. Thackeray's fine work and note certain inconsistencies in the spelling thereof, and do the same for Mr. Darwin and his Origin of Species.

Some random thoughts about -ise and -ize verbs in British English.

As a change from writing grammar exercises for foreign students, I've decided with this post to make a small contribution to the debate on the position of -ise/-ize verbs in Britain. It is rather long and quite detailed, and illustrated with lots of examples.

Inversion in Conditionals

Image made with Wordle

There's not an awful lot on the Internet or in grammar books on the inversion of conditionals, so I thought I'd take quite a detailed look at it, with plenty of exercises.

This post consists of:

• Four introductory exercises
• The basic principles
• First conditional - exercise
• Second conditional - exercise
• Third conditional - exercise
• Inverting negatives
• Mixed conditionals
• If it wasn't/weren't/hadn't been for ... - exercise
• Bringing it all together - exercise
• Should - advanced point - aspect
• How do we know when we can invert in real tense conditionals?
• Exceptions - should, have and were to have done

Should you find the introductory exercises too difficult, or would prefer to go straight the explanation, you can skip (miss out) the first section.