Television scriptwriter and author Ben Aaronovitch on why Google’s Ngram Viewer should be a regular port of call for writers of historical drama.

‘Sticking out like a sore thumb’, incid­entally, appears to have originated in the middle of the nineteenth century. Likewise, ‘port of call’.

Languagehat.com reports on a new edition of H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I have a copy of the second edition, so I can’t say if the entry below derives from Fowler or from the equally wonder­fully named Sir Ernest Gowers (who revised the text in the 1960s), but it’s a charac­ter­ist­ically dry dismantling of a certain misuse of language that I’d assumed was only a modern complaint. It seems, however, that it’s been going on for ages, figur­at­ively speaking. (Or, if it’s an addition of Gower’s, literally decades.)

literally. We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression ‘not [literally], of course, but in a manner of speaking’, we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate […] The Prime Minister sat through the debate [literally] glued to the Treasury bench […]

I have to apologise to the student I recently mentored, who used the word in a story I was critiquing. I didn’t exactly quote the above, but I came close.

Nip it in the bud, I say. (In a manner of speaking.)

A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscrip­tions created by different artisans.

From Scientific American, research into the ways in which stories can “enhance social skills by acting as simulators for the brain” and can help people “make sense of increas­ingly complex social relation­ships”.

A list of over 400 of the rarest modern English words, including a long list of unusual adjectives of relation.