Listen now to the latest programme, featuring linguistics lecturer Dr Lynne Murphy talking about the differences between UK and US English.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

Check out Lynne Murphy’s excellent blog Separated by a Common Language (and here’s how to spell ‘woa/whoa/woah’). You can also follow Lynne on Twitter @lynneguist.

Our post on giraffe bread tells how the tiger changed its stripes.

Rob got five, Lynne got seven – see how well you do in our new dictionary words quiz.

Meet the mucus troopers and the adultescents in Collins’ 2004 attempt to create a Living Dictionary.

If you too think that there’s a lot to be said for learning a word a day, try following @wordoftheday on Twitter.

Finally, if you’d like to keep track of those pesky Britishisms in American English, see Ben Yagoda’s blog Not One-Off Britishisms.

The real story isn’t quite so magical as that sounds. But Sainsbury’s response to a letter from a little girl, which has now led them to change the name of their tiger bread to giraffe bread, was certainly inspired.

For those who missed it, the UK supermarket received a letter last May questioning the name of the pattern-crusted loaf: why call it ‘tiger’ when it was clearly not stripy? ‘It should be called giraffe bread’, the letter went on. ‘Love from Lily Robinson age 3½.’

What’s more, as of 31 January, it is – at least for now. A victory that may be for Lily (who actually ‘hasn’t got much time for’ the story, according to her mother’s blog, where the letters appeared). But it’s Sainsbury’s reputation that’s the real winner, as the story has become an internet sensation. And it’s all thanks to the well-judged and endearing reply that customer-service manager Chris King (age 27⅓) sent.

‘Thanks so much for your letter,’ he wrote. ‘I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it?

‘It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.’

You’d also have to be pretty silly not to realise the power of social media now has over public opinion. (More than four thousand people Like the Chris King from Sainsbury’s is a legend Facebook page at the time of writing.)

Customer-service representatives probably spend most of their time appeasing angry and outraged letter-writers. But this is a great reminder that you can generate a lot of good feeling by making time for the sweet and silly correspondence too. That’s how you’ll really earn your stripes.

If you’re in the customer-service field, you might also like our article on how to make the most of positive correspondence: Now you’re talking my language.

So why not do the same for the words and terms that entered our lives – or at least the dictionaries – in 2011?* You can make your own mind up about which of those categories these words fall into, but – more to the point – can you pick the correct definition for each from the choices below?

Let us know how you got on. Have you used any of the terms? (We’ve already heard from a keen cricketer about an alternative meaning for one of them.) If not, will you be adding any of them to your vocabulary? And which ones (if any) are you hoping to forget long before the year is out?

* Words taken from 2011 entries in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Collins English Dictionary

And if that’s put you in a quizzing mood, why not pit yourself against our fiendish spelling test?

<<Read the February 2012 e-bulletin

40 minutes

Listen now to the latest programme, featuring communications expert Sharí Alexander: how to get what you want every time you speak.

Further reading

If you’d like to know more about any of the topics discussed, try these links.

Here are the BBC’s article on bionic contact lenses, the Guardian’s article on contact lenses containing LEDs and circuits and this release from the University of Washington.

Neurosciencemarketing.com has written about bad adjectives and Futurelab has written a counterpoint: when adjectives can be good.

And here’s John Naughton’s response to Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks about email and PCMag.com’s 9 reasons email is dead.

<< Read the January 2012 e-bulletin

The findings come from social media scientist Dan Zarrella, who aims – in his book Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness – to demystify social media marketing for the masses.

After examining how often online content was shared, he came to one definite conclusion: the less complex the language, the more likely it was to be passed on. And, after studying which types of words were the most mobile, he found the biggest no-nos were adjectives and adverbs.

This is actually a good tip for just about any writing. It’s easy to imagine that cramming in adjectives will give your writing colour or help create more vivid images in your reader’s mind. But more often than not they do just the opposite, and merely add clutter that slows your reader down.

Fledgling fiction writers are taught to adopt the lotus position and chant the mantra ‘show, don’t tell’ over and over until their posture is perfect and they never want to overdo the adjectives and adverbs again. But this advice – evidently – isn’t only for creative writing.

It’s much better to choose verbs (the most-shared word type) and nouns that work hard, rather than using adjectives or adverbs as crutches for your writing to hobble along on. The finished piece will be tighter and more expressive for it. For example, instead of ran quickly, how about sprinted? Or bounded? See how either could replace the phrase, but each gives a very different – and more distinct – mental image?

Sometimes adjectives are simply redundant. Forward planning, for example. Is anyone out there still planning what to do yesterday? Have a look at these (genuine) examples and spot the pointless words:

Teen dies after fatal stabbing

Gunned down by armed rebels

A visual treat for the eyes

Ill-chosen adjectives can also lead to unintentional silliness (which can be delightful – for everyone but the writer):

Stiff opposition expected to casket-less funeral plan

Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25

This isn’t to say that all adjectives should be banned on pain of death. Mark Twain put it nicely, if you’ll forgive the adverb: ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.’

Perhaps it’s worth thinking of them like magnets: repellent together, useful kept apart, and not recommended anywhere near computers.

<<Read the February 2012 e-bulletin

31 minutes

In this podcast, communication strategist David Levin joins Rob Ashton and Andy White to discuss strategies for approaching difficult conversations in the workplace.

Further reading

Did something in particular catch your interest? Here are some links to what we talked about.

Here’s Ben Yagoda’s article on Slate.com, The Britishism Invasion.

And some Census statistics showing the increase in Welsh speakers between 1991 and 2001.

David mentions having lived with the Zuni people in New Mexico. Here’s a page from the community’s own website, describing the language, and here’s a more analytical one from Omniglot.com.

The book by John Miller, to which David contributed, is QBQ! The Question Behind the Question and here’s a video of John in action.

David’s own book is Don’t Just Talk – Be Heard.

Go on, let your inner geek out to play. Share this link and challenge your colleagues to a spell-off. You know you want to …

Once you have your score, why not leave us a message in the comments section below to let us know how you got on? And if you have any spelling tips you’d like to share, such as mnemonics, we’d love to hear them.

But it can be more confusing for those coming to the language later. And it’s hardly surprising, considering how many definitions these tiny but mighty words can carry. In can be an adverb, noun, adjective or preposition, while on can be an adjective, adverb or preposition. As prepositions alone, they each have over a dozen definitions.

Isabel from Natural England wrote in on the subject: ‘In Spanish, both translate as “en” and I am unsure when to use one or the other in many situations. Is it a matter of learning them by heart or are there any useful rules out there?’

The answer to that (perhaps unfortunately) lies somewhere in between. But for the most common areas where these two words share territory, this downloadable PDF will be a handy reference. Print it off, stick it on your wall or monitor, and the rules will soon be lodged in your mind.

Download In or on

When you join the session, you will see a control panel on the right side of your screen that looks something like this:

To watch and hear the presentation, you shouldn’t need to do anything – just listen through your headset and watch the screen.

If you have any questions, you can ‘raise your hand’ to ask a question by pressing the ‘raise hand’ button:

When Rob is ready to take your question, he will un-mute your microphone.

You can also ask a question by typing it into the box, as shown below:

We look forward to seeing you there.

If you missed the session but would like to watch a recording of it, you can do so here.

32 minutes

Rob Ashton and Andy White discuss the secret life of pronouns, proofreading tips and why the Freedom of Information Act may have taken all the excitement out of government communications.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

The Planet Word series with Stephen Fry has now finished, but it’s available to buy from Amazon and other bookshops. The episode that Rob was talking about is this one.

Professor James Pennebaker is a social psychologist based at the University of Texas. His book The Secret Life of Pronouns examines how and why pronouns and other forgettable words reveal so much about us.

The tool Rob mentions that analyses your writing is no longer available. But you can test your instincts about pronouns with this quiz and, if you’re on Twitter, have your personality analysed via your tweets.

Americans will be familiar with the Gettysburg address, but for any Brits wishing to brush up, Gregory Peck does a good job of reading it in this video.

Here’s the letter from the civil servant to the Guardian about the Freedom of Information Act making communication in the public sector ‘anodyne, benign and sterile’.

For more tips on proofreading, you might like this post on our blog. And to make sure you never forget to check the headings and furniture, see this collection of newspaper blunders. Finally, test your observational powers with this monkey business: how many times do the players wearing white pass the ball?