Updates 2017

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20 December 2017- 3 January 2018

As you can tell, we've gone all Christmassy this week! A reminder that we have a nice interesting blog entry in features. If you've got a sense of humour, great! But if you are ultra-serious about Christmas - particularly in Poland - or you simply don't find anything funny, then maybe you should avoid... We have now compiled our miserable student's words of wisdom of 2017, so you can find out all the more amusing things he's been saying here. Not4grammarbores:  All our new words are connected with literature... well, it is Christmas, and there's a lot of different kinds of literature associated with the subject. So we have haiku, parable, fable, fairy tale, tale, poem, poetry, rhyme, novel and play.

Miserable student quote: 'I hate Christmas. I buy all the presents but Santa gets all the credit.'

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13 December 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are story, literature and mnemonic. However, next week all our new words will be connected with literature... well, it is Christmas, and there's a lot of different kinds of literature associated with the subject.  

And talking of Christmas, we have a nice interesting blog entry in features. If you've got a sense of humour, great! But if you are ultra-serious about Christmas - particularly in Poland - or you simply don't find anything funny, then maybe you should avoid...

Miserable student quote: 'Peeling onions is like watching too much online television. My eyes were streaming.'

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6 December 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are linker, proverb and reporting verb. 

What's the difference? A little spelling with refuge/refugee.

Miserable student quote: 'Someone said I should express my opinions or intentions clearly, but I was non-committal.'

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29 November 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are binomial, topic and subject. Yes, we're going a little quiet as we slowly build up to the Christmas edition...

Miserable student quote: 'I occasionally get insomnia but I don't lose any sleep about it.'

 

22 November 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are defining relative clauses, non-defining relative clauses, argument, contradiction and debate.

TEE: In grammar, door is not a plural word...

Miserable student quote: 'Someone emailed me an advertisement about processed meat. It was spam.'

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15 November 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are metaphor, alliteration, simile, figure of speech and cleft sentence.

Miserable student quote: 'Six people, one after the other, all asked me If I knew the answer to what was very foolish or strange. I thought it was crazy.'

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8 November 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are abstract nouns, compound nouns, common nouns, concrete nouns and consonant clusters. And in​ Cartoony Universe we have a new mini-comic strip! (It has very little to do with English, however. But I drew it and now I'm going to publish it!)

Miserable student quote: 'Thesaurus? Gosh, words fail me when I try to think of synonyms.'

1 November 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are innuendo, double entendre, pun, affricate and fricative.

Miserable student quote: 'A lexicographer? Well, what they do I can only put into so many words.'

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25 October 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are plosive, voiced sounds, voiceless sounds, unvoiced sounds and stop.

TEE: This is all about right. Well, it becomes clear when you read it...

Miserable student quote: 'Someone described this half-an-apartment as being on a hill, but I thought it was a bit-flat.'

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18 October 2017

Not4grammarbores: Our new words this week are anonymous authority, accusative case, nominative case, case and onomatopoeia.

Miserable student quote: 'I went to a paper fair. They had tracing, photocopying, corrugated, white and much more, but after one hour I got board.'

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11 October 2017

In Not4grammarbores, our new words this week are longhand, shorthand, predictive text, invented word, nonce word and neologism. In Quizzes and puzzles, a new codeword quote for you: work out the quotation and its author!

Miserable student quote: 'Somebody invented an invisible scoreboard, but I couldn't see the points.'

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4 October 2017

In Not4grammarbores, the letters T & U now have their own page, and our new words this week are cursive, portmanteau word, handwriting, script (we have a second definition!) and print.

Miserable student quote: 'I was on a comprehension course but I didn't understand it.'

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27 September 2017

We have a new homepage layout, as you can see, plus in What's the difference, there's lots of words that have a similar meaning to travel such as excursion, outing and crossing, and in Not4grammarbores, our new words are decimal mark, dot, weasel words, lower case, small letter and upper case.

Miserable student quote: 'I wanted to talk about how men should be far more positive in life, but my girlfriend wouldn't let me.'

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20 September 2017

In Not4grammarbores, our new words are underline/underscore, hash, asterisk, bullet and bullet point.

Miserable student quote: 'I was told that I had no choice but to talk to a lot of people who were over 100 kilos in weight or more. Or in other words, I had to face the fats.'

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13 September 2017

In Misunderstandings, we have an update as regards an existing typical error entry, but with the error itself (Oh just read it and you'll understand), and in Not4grammarbores, our new words are quotation marks, backslash, forward slash, stroke and slash.

Miserable student quote: 'It took me just ten seconds to produce a round, flat piece of black plastic upon which I can store sounds such as music. It must be a record.'

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6 September 2017

As well as the joke in the top left hand corner... and the cartoon of course, we have some more new words in Not4grammarbores, and these are linking verb, elision, genitive, saxon genitive, solecism and emoji.

Miserable student quote: 'I once worked in an ointment factory. It was a disaster. Even today, my friends still think it's funny and they keep rubbing it in.'

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30 August 2017

A Brief History of English has had a little extra material added to it, and as a result, we have a new article, To "inform, educate and entertain": the rise and fall of BBC English and plummy accents. In Not4grammarbores, we have schwa, phonology, semantics, complement and copula verb.

Miserable student quote: 'I once worked at a perfume factory. I tried mixing still water, mineral water, tap water and fizzy water, but I was told it wouldn't make any scents.'

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5 July 2017

False Friends 5 is now with us for our Polish students, and in Not4grammarbores, we have response, reply, transcript, script, typo, typography and typographical error. Plus, of course, our special summer home page. 

Miserable student quote: 'I was asked to give a talk on courage, but I wasn't very brave.'

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28 June 2017

In Not4grammarbores, we have Old English, Middle English, Modern English, profanity and fronting.

Miserable student quote: 'Someone's setting up a conference about impulsive people. It starts in five seconds.'

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21 June 2017

In Quizzes and Exercises, try your hand at the wonderful game of articles risk. In Not4grammarbores, we have ampersand (&), word order, SVO language, synthetic language, analytical language and inflectional language.

Miserable student quote: 'I was invited to a meeting about people being superfluous, but then they told me I wasn't needed.'

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14 June 2017

It has nothing to do with the website, but here's a simple guide to last week's general election. In Not4grammarbores, the entry for the present continuous has been split into two, with the second entry now called present continuous with 'going to'. We have also added future intention, paragraph, superstition, shibboleth, fetishes, ambiguity, first person, second person, third person, antonym.

Miserable student quote: 'The only time I'm perfect is when I'm writing a job application form.'

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7 June 2017

In misunderstandings, we have something that we can't always be sympathetic about, and in Not4grammarbores, five more new words: perfect participle, rules, usage, talking, utterance

Miserable student quote: 'It's strange that when a police car drives behind me. I feel more worried than protected.'

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31 May 2017

In Not4grammarbores, five more lovely new words: phonetics, illiterate, rhetoric, rhetorical question, second language.

Miserable student quote: 'My group had a maths test. 56% passed. I was one of the 33% that failed.'

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24 May 2017

In Not4grammarbores, five more lovely new words: loanword, borrowing, calque, voice and flat adverb, and in What's the difference, we have teacher/tutor and a lot more words that describe people whose job it is to tell you what to do in life.

Miserable student quote: 'I'm clearly getting old. Work is now a lot less fun, but fun now seems a lot more work.'

 

17 May 2017

In Not4grammarbores, six more lovely new words: stem, Proper English, Etymology, base, code-switching, convention, plus the Polish False Friends puzzles have now been placed into their own sub-section in Quizzes and Exercises in preparation for... yes, a Polish False Friends 5! There are also a few minor additions to the new Expressing numbers in English feature... (That didn't take long!) :-)

Miserable student quote: 'I've discovered it's possible to do two things at once. Waste time and be unproductive..'

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10 May 2017

Yay! Expressing numbers in English has now been added, more cartoons added to the cartoon sections (as previously published here on the home page and on Facebook), and in Not4grammarbores, six lovely new words: pedant, spelling, eloquence, proscribe, accidence and declension.

Miserable student quote: 'Somebody wanted to take me to a presentation called 'I can tell you everything', but I didn't want to know.'

 

3 May 2017

We're having a little party this week as we have finally managed to change all the remaining black bold entries to red in Not4grammarbores with a considerable number of new words and terms: fluency, glossary, encyclopedia, request, first language, asking, answer. From this point on, we will have lots of brand new terms to add in our goal to be the most comprehensive English language glossary on the net!

Miserable student quote: 'I bought a puzzle. It said on the box, '3-8 years'. I managed to do it in six months.'

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26 April 2017

A new addition to Misunderstandings, and it has nothing to do with the Roman Empire, and there's also the usual additions to Not4grammarbores with a considerable number of new words and terms: participle, present participle, mood, instruction, indicative mood, cardinal number, high rising terminal/rising inflection, conversational English, inflection, presentation

Miserable student quote: 'There was a tomato trying to run after another tomato. It was tomato catchup.'

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12 April 2017

We've been mainly focussing on Not4grammarbores with a considerable number of new words and terms: absolute adjective, double comparison, formal writing, parenthesis, style, style guide, grammatical articles, inserts, rank, root word, Latin.

Miserable student quote: 'Someone asked in a humorous way what word describes something that will make you laugh. I thought it was funny.'

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5 April 2017

The conditionals feature has had the painters in and has also had some of the original puzzles added, plus there's more new words added to Not4grammarbores: hesitator, pause, functional grammar, morpheme, morphology, function word, affix.

Miserable student quote: 'In my English exam, the alarm bell rang when I got to the section on punctuation. Everything came to a full stop.'

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29 March 2017

The letter Y comes under scrutiny as we argue as to whether it should be a vowel or a consonant, plus there's quite a few new words added to Not4grammarbores: third conditional, mixed conditional, rhetorical conditional, zero conditional + imperative, English language, conversation plus all the letters of the English alphabet now have their own entries. And if you're looking for the conditional exercises in Quizzes and Exercises, well, they're not there anymore. They're going to be revamped as they were considered difficult, and then added to the conditional feature.

Miserable student quote: 'I went on a bargain hunt and shot a TV and a ladies' coat.'

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22 March 2017

It's bye-bye to the grammar police and hello to Illustrated Idioms. There's quite a few new words added to Not4grammarbores: irreversible word pairs, perfect aspect, idiomatic phrases, Standard English, listening, third conditional, acrophony, NATO Phonetic Alphabet, plus the individual letters A to L now all have their own entries.

Miserable student quote: 'I was invited to a seminar called 'We're not using our minds properly', but I never gave it a thought.'

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15 March 2017

Not a lot, but there are some more new words added to Not4grammarbores: reading, pedagogic grammar, dysfluency, second conditional.

Miserable student quote: 'I'm on a vodka diet. I've already lost four days.'

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8 March 2017

Doctor Dot Fullstop has some interesting comments to make on the subject of speech balloons, and there are plenty more new words added to Not4grammarbores: speaking, linguist, descriptive, first conditional, broadcast, corpus linguistics, prescriptivist.

Miserable student quote: 'My girlfriend is on holiday in San Francisco.  She sent me a postcard of Alcatraz and wrote, 'wish you were there'.

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1 March 2017

In Quizzes and exercises, a new grammar game to add called Prepositions Risk, and there are more new words added to Not4grammarbores: writing, essay, zero/open conditional, prescriptive, corpus, corpora

Miserable student quote: 'I had a problem on what to do with some salt. Someone told me to put it in some water. What a good solution.'

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22 February 2017

Apart from the site now finally feeling big and grown-up, the feature on the book has now been updated, There's a brand new question for Doctor Dot Fullstop as regards what are the total number of words in the English language, and there are more new words added to Not4grammarbores: swung dash, dictionary, expression, semi-colon, comma splice

Miserable student quote: 'We were driving north on the motorway from Krakow to Gdansk. My Polish girlfriend then asked me if we could go east to Warsaw. I said it was a right turn off. She hit me. I don't know why...'

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15 February 2017

Another, but possibly the final Polish False Friends puzzle in quizzes and exercises, plus more new words added to Not4grammarbores: alphabet, colon, bracket

Miserable student quote: 'I beat an egg last week. I scored 53 points, the egg 37.'