Random thoughts on Mr Gwynne, sex and gender

Neville Gwynne is the author of a best-selling grammar book 'Gwynne’s Grammar', modestly entitled 'The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English'. I confess to not having read Mr Gwynne's book, but I think we can get a fairly good idea as to the affable Mr Gwynne's attitude to English in various other ways: from an interview he gave on BBC Radio 5, from a grammar quiz he wrote for the Telegraph newspaper, from the Preface, first two chapters and recommended reading from the book itself, available to read at Amazon; and from various reviews, especially rather a long one in the Telegraph.

While I was reading the preface to his book at Amazon, I came across an apparent distinction between the words gender and sex I had only vaguely heard about before.

A Brief History of Tense

The standard TEFL model - twelve tenses (or forms)

In EFL and ESL, we usually talk of twelve tenses or forms, each being a combination of a time and an aspect. Although few EFl / ESL writers would talk of a twelve tense system, that's what it really amounts to.

But writers on grammar haven't always seen it like that (and some don't today). As so many old grammar books are available on the web these days, whether at Project Gutenberg, Google Books or Archive.org, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at how English tenses have been treated over the centuries, and have a look at some old grammar books at the same time.

Archive.org deserves a special mention. Their books are freely available in several formats; the online facsimile versions (which I link to in the text) are very easy to read through and find things in, but they also have other formats for downloading, for example for e-readers.

Having a think about 'another think coming'

If you thought that, you've got another think (or thing) coming

There are now two versions of this idiom in use, one ending in another think coming, and another in another thing coming. People of my generation are probably more familiar with the think version, but if you're under fifty, it's likely that it's the thing version you know.

Although I personally think the repetition of think is the whole point of this expression, it seems that the thing version is more prevalent nowadays. I don't really want to get into discussions about the correctness of one or the other in this post (there's plenty of that in the links), but rather to find early examples of the think version.

Common mistakes learners make - discuss about

Foreign learners quite often want to say something like - "we discussed about last night's match". This is perhaps not surprising, for two reasons:

• "discuss" is really just another (more formal) way of saying "talk about"
  We discussed (talked about) the new system.
• the noun "discussion" is often (and correctly) followed by the preposition "about"
  We had a discussion about the new system.

But in Standard English, we don't use discuss about like this.

Whom watch #3 - Silly infographic

Continuing an occasional series where I look at silly or downright bad articles etc about whom on the Internet.

The other day I was looking through a teacher’s blog which had kindly linked to mine, when I came across an ‘infographic’ with the title “Who vs whom”. I rather feared the worst.

Outwith - collected quotes

Collected outwith quotes

Some time ago I wrote a post titled 'Is outwith a word?' (link below), which continues to get quite a lot of hits. The preposition outwith is used in educated Scottish English to mean something like 'outside, not part of'. One way to look at it is as the opposite of within.

Recently there have been a couple of comments on that post which have led me to look for examples among well-known Scottish writers, and I thought it might be a good idea to collect these examples of outwith together, where possible linking to them in Google Books or other source.

I've also included a section with more historical use, often using facsimiles from the books themselves. Apart from anything else, these show what the Scottish English of the Court and the Law of these times looked like, and the sort of spellings that were then prevalent.

As it is my intention that this should be an ongoing work, and that I will be adding examples to it as and when I find them, I've made a page rather than a post for them, which can be found here.

• Collected outwith quotes
• Is outwith a word?

Confusing verbs - consist, include, make up, comprise and constitute etc

We can use several verbs to talk about the parts that form or make up something (the whole). Some can be a little confusing, and with one, not everybody agrees on all its uses. Read a bit about them and do a short exercise. (Hat-tip to Peter Harvey at Lavengro, whose post gave me the idea - see links).