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.