Random thoughts - he was sat, she was stood

Some time ago there was a rather lively discussion on the language blog, Pain in the English, about these two idiomatic expressions. Let's take a look at a couple of examples from Google Books:

He was sat there with his arms over the back of the sofa looking really upset so I thought there was something ...

Under the Rotunda - Danny Bernardi

In an instant Dave knew that he was stood on a road and that there was a vehicle coming ...

The Company - James McCann

And here's one with both

We saw him later on chatting to another bunch of bemused holidaymakers, only they were sat down and he was stood in front of them, in his Speedos ...

Thai Tales - Justin Dunn

Read a bit more about these expressions. What do they mean and are they grammatically acceptable?

Random thoughts - on the cusp

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian ran what they called 'a fiendish language quiz', set by their 'style guru', David Marsh, author of the recently published 'For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection'. In one of the questions, entrants had to say what was wrong with this sentence:

'Outstanding performances include Caryl Morgan's Beatie, in bobby socks and denim, on the cusp of womanhood but still impressionable and dreamy, and Sara Harris-Davies as the mother she still looks up to.'

The answers have now been published, and the official answer to this one was:

You can't be on the cusp of one thing. Although it is often misused to mean "on the brink" or "on the verge", strictly "on the cusp" involves two things, for example "on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini" or, as it should have been here, "on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood".

While taking the point that a cusp is between two things (often two periods), I wondered whether it was really necessary to explicitly mention both; on the cusp of womanhood looked fine to me. So I decided to investigate.

Common mistakes learners make - according to me

When giving your opinion, it is quite common in some languages, for example Polish, Spanish and Italian, to use a construction which can be directly translated as according to me:

• Polish - według mnie
• Spanish - según yo
• Italian - secondo me

In English, however, we don't usually use according to like this.

Some random thoughts on tell about

When reading ESL teachers' blogs I sometimes come upon as instruction like - 'tell about something that happened to you this week'. Now that doesn't sound quite right to me; I expect to read 'tell me' or 'tell us' about something. Without a personal object, I'd expect 'talk about something that happened to you this week'.

At first, I thought this was because the teachers weren't native speakers, but then I noticed a couple of examples from American writers, so I thought I'd have a bit of a closer look

Some random thoughts about hurt people and dictionaries

We can often use participles (usually ending in -ed or -ing) as adjectives. A present participle (-ing form) usually has an active meaning and a past participle (3rd form) usually has a passive meaning:

• The winning team was cheered loudly by its supporters.
  = the team which won - active meaning
• The players of the defeated team looked exhausted.
  = the team that was defeated - passive meaning

In this post, I'm interested in one particular pair of adjectives made from past participles (PPs): injured and hurt.

Random-ize: Bentley's Miscellany and the spelling of -ize suffix verbs

Founded by the publisher of the Standard Novels series, Richard Bentley, his Miscellany was a literary magazine, publishing novels in installment form. The first editor was Charles Dickens, whose second novel, Oliver Twist, first appeared in the magazine, starting in the first issue.

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. For more on the spelling of -ize verbs in periodicals, see the Periodicals start page.

Random-ise: The Spectator and the spelling of -ize suffix verbs

The Spectator started off life as a liberal-radical periodical, and is now the intellectual forum of modern conservatism. It bears the same name as, but has nothing to do with, a famous 18th century magazine published by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele from 1711 to 1712.

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. For more on the spelling of -ize verbs in periodicals, see the Periodicals start page.