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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
I was teaching the history of the English Language and had just mentioned that, following the English Civil War, Charles I had been convicted of treason and beheaded.
A question came from the back of the classroom: “Why do we say beheaded and decapitated, not the other way around?”
Hydrogen is becoming a more versatile fuel, with the potential of storing and transporting renewable energy. This OUPblog post explores hydrogen’s use in electricity and heating and predicts greater demand for it in the future.
Where do you find the origin and, if necessary, the meaning of never say die, never mind, and other phrases of this type? Should you look them up under never, say, die, or mind? Will they be there?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted a curious disconnect between the supposed ideological objective of the war and the means used to achieve it.
This past April, the Oxford English Dictionary hosted the World English Symposium, a two-day event featuring a series of parallel sessions and panels on topics relating not only to varieties of English, but language prejudice, colonialism, and context-based English language teaching, among others.
Last summer, my city’s community forum had a post that generated considerable discussion about the meaning of the word kid. Our governor had announced, via Twitter, that “All Oregon kids ages 1-18, regardless of immigration status, can get free summer meals” from the state’s Summer Food Service Program.
In the past few decades, trust and distrust have become frequent subjects of journalistic and academic discourse. Distrust of British and American public institutions has, in fact, a much longer and more complex history than most academics recognize.
Baffling though this seems to most Europeans, President Putin believes that by invading Ukraine he is defending Orthodox Christianity from the godless West.
Here are 10 books that we recommend you read if you’re looking to immerse yourself in the world of classical literature, but don’t know where to start:
The 26th May 2022 marks the 125th anniversary of Dracula’s publication. Despite its reputation as one of the great Gothic novels, there are facts about Dracula that might surprise even the most hardcore fans.
What does the law say about sexual harassment in the workplace? Barrister Astra Emir provides a guide to UK law on harassment for employers and employees.
Idioms are phrases and often pose questions not directly connected with linguistics. Linguists interested in the origin of idioms should be historians and archeologists.
Today, stopping violence against women falls to few. The criminal legal system is charged with enforcing laws. A school delivers prevention programming to the children in attendance that day. A doctor privately addresses a survivor’s pain.
After the Fall of France in 1940, historian Marc Bloch famously spoke of France’s “strange defeat” by Germany. Emmanuel Macron’s victory on April 24 might just as appropriately be called a “strange victory”.
The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina–All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way–is popular among development practitioners, who often offer their own version as follows: All rich economies are alike; each poor economy is poor in its own way. This idea, which we can call the Anna Karenina principle of economic development, is meant as a recognition of the value of context and local knowledge.
Idioms are a thankful subject: one needs no etymological algebra or linguistic preparation for suggesting the origin of phrases. And yet it may be useful to explain how a professional goes about studying idioms.