Pain in the English… and other blogs I love

I am a blog addict. I read blogs about all sorts of things. Of course I have a selection of language-related blogs that I follow regularly.

Pain in the English is a very interesting website. It essentially deals with all those things about English that are so difficult to figure out both for (some) native and (most) non-native speakers alike.

PainInTheEnglish.com encourages discussions of such gray areas of the English language, for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries and other reference books.

(You can read more about the website’s “mission” here).

I always find very useful comments and explanations on the site and some interesting discussions too. A few examples:

• the use of gift as a verb. I hear it often enough, and I now understand it is a new development which is not universally accepted (or liked).
• Is there a gustative equivalent to the olfactory “malodour”? Well, in Italian of course we do have “saporaccio”, while “maleodore” is much less common.
• Correct prepositions following different.

Another blog that I love is The English Blog: an invaluable resource for teachers of English, even at the University level. The materials published in the blog posts are a true source of inspiration and got me off the hook more than once when I was in desperate need of data to exemplify specific phenomena. So if you need to teach your students how to describe trends and data, you could use this Valentine’s Day Economy Infographic!

I am always looking forward to any new update to The Virtual Linguist. The topics treated are varied: I enjoy posts about the meaning of words and the connections between language and society. See this brilliant post about the “unmentionables” or the very interesting article about language and the ability to count.

The Tower of Confusion has often good articles too. I found this about language acquisition especially interesting: Speaking too early is a waste of time.

There are many more cool language-related blogs out there, but I’m saving those for another time!