Insights archive
Red Pony is a team of writers, editors, Microsoft Office template developers and communications trainers. We have been writing about our areas of expertise since 2009 in our Red Pony Express newsletter.
This collection features a selection of our best articles.
Pedants’ corner: Old words, new meanings
The philosophers tell us that life is change. And this applies to language no less than it does to the creeping decrepitude of our mortal flesh. However, just as there will come a time when I can be more accurately described as ‘food for worms’ than ‘Andrew’, so there comes in the evolution of a word—‘literally’, for example—a point at which its old meaning is eclipsed by its new.
Episodes in the archaeology of spelling
Spelling in the English language can sometimes seem a very arbitrary proposition. Aside from the peculiarities within the language itself, there’s the long list of variations between US and British/Australian usage.
The man without words
As Schaller explains, the consequence of not having a ‘language’ is so profound as to be almost unimaginable. Words not only affect how we interact with the world around us, they even control our capacity to think and conceptualise our experiences. We need words not only to communicate with other people, but also to build our own mental concepts of the world, our experience of it, of who we are.
Verbing nouns
But where does experimentation with language stop and gibberish start? A recent article in the Boston Globe tackled the problem of ‘verbing’ nouns. What? Well, when you verb a noun you are – just like it sounds – turning it into a verb.
Spelling traps – licence/license and practice/practise
The closest competitors for the stationary/stationery pairing (one of which, hopefully the correct one, you’ll find in my article above) for the title of Most Confused Spelling are the practice/practise and licence/license combinations.
Etymology corner
Welcome to an occasional feature of the Red Pony Express that will uncover the murky origins of mysterious phrases that have entered everyday idiom but which do not immediately betray their origins. This month: pushing the envelope, which means to exceed or extend the boundaries of the possible (or indeed, the permissible).