Language

Boris Johnson has been honoured with the Golden Bull award, a prize handed out annually by the Plain English Campaign, that highlights the “worst example of written tripe” from the past year.

The first thing that hits you about this exhibition is ‘why the hell did it take them so long?’. A subject as fascinating as the history of our language would seem a no-brainer for an institution like the British Library. Indeed, nowhere else on Earth …

Inner-city London: for hundreds of years the multi-cultural melting pot of communities from around the globe. It should hardly come as a surprise that English isn’t always the dominant language, yet for certain sections of the media it appears to. According to a study by …

Congratulations – you can read! (Presumably. Unless you just look at Londonist for the pictures.) Literacy is sexy. Hyper-literacy, even sexier. Or so we at Londonist tell ourselves as we don our Coke-bottle glasses and curl up each night with a bottle of wine and …

Words: useful little critters, no? Without them we’d be, well, a lot of things, but most certainly out of a job. From puns to poetry, improv to irony, books to blogs, we pretty much revel in all that language has to offer. But no, we …

As you all know, Londonist doesn’t just enjoy sarcastically mocking aspects of our fair city. No, far from it – we also like to help people out from time to time. So, we were only too pleased to offer our help when San Francisco-based artist …

Meet Language. Based in East London (but not defined by it!), they’ve chosen their myspace category to be “melodramatic popular song”, are obsessed with falafel, like dressing in black, have a song called “Theme for a Porno”, record on Hornsey Road and were screwed out …

There are London Literature Festivals, and then there’s London Literature Plus. This independent rival to the South Bank’s extravagnza also kicked off yesterday, and involves almost 30 lit-related events. Here’s a pick of the highlights. July 3: Poejazzi. Poetry and jazz? Not necessarily a winning …

Language specialists are frittering away more good grant money on researching regional accents in cows. “They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from.” Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: “I …

Cockneys, the stereotypical Londoners, are famed for their slang. Rhyming slang used to be commonplace within the sound of Bow bells, but it seems that young cockneys, are now reverting to more modern colloquialisms. They have gone from using ‘spritten English’ (text language etc.) to …