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If you are interested in swearing, profanity and the myriad, foul-mouthed joys of rude words, the Strong Language blog will be right up your strasse. Featuring articles on the wonderful pubic wig known as the merkin , DIY oath-making and a hugely impressive - nay fan-f***ing-tastic - resources archive , it really is the bee's knees, the mutt's nuts, the dog's bollocks and the ultimate shiznit.

A year or two ago, I put up a list of links to articles that might be used as style models or sources of inspiration for the A2 writing coursework part of the AQA A (Language Intervention) and AQA B (Media Text) specifications. This has been updated a few times, thanks to links that colleagues and blog/Twitter people have sent me, but I thought it was probably time to add a few more, so here goes. If you are a teacher reading this, you might also find this useful for the new AQA English Language A level that starts being taught in September 2015, where Paper 2 has a writing task similar to the media text and intervention. Again, I'd be delighted to add any others if you want to suggest them, either as comments on this blog post or as tweets via @EngLangBlog. Opinion pieces English can absorb this assault from texting (Canadian article) Isabelle Kerr on silly new words and why they shouldn't be in the dictionary Fay Schopen complains about young people and language John McWho...

Benedict Cumberbatch - a famous actor whose face has been likened to that of an otter  - has apologised for causing offence by his inadvertent use of the term 'coloured' to refer to Black people. In an interview (ironically) about opportunities in acting for non-white actors, he dropped the c-bomb (not that one...) when he said, "I think as far as coloured actors go, it gets really different in the UK, and a lot of my friends have had more opportunities here [in America] than in the UK, and that’s something that needs to change." (from The Guardian ). 'Coloured' is a strange word and one that causes a degree of confusion to a lot of people. The Civil Rights movement in the USA was often supported by the organisation NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) but in South Africa 'coloured' was a term used to segregate anyone who wasn't white but who wasn't entirely black.  For a lot of older/middle-aged people in the UK...

If you are an A level English Language teacher, Ian Cushing & Marcello Giovanelli are interested in hearing about the factors that influence your choice of specification for a piece of research they are carrying out. You can access the survey here .

While sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself with a bout of man-flu , this article about a curious phenomenon called manterrupting popped up on Twitter. Apparently, manterrupting is when males interrupt women in meetings and/or co-opt (or bropropriate* ) their ideas as their own. It's a man-word like these explained here by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionaries blog and makes use of the man- prefix that has become so productive in recent years. So far we've had... mansplaining : patronising explanations delivered by men to women of things that women probably already know more about (Urban Dictionary definition here ) manspreading : sitting on public transport and spreading one's sweaty flannels in order to secure more seat space (Collins Dictionary definition here ) manscaping : removing unsightly body hair to make oneself more attractive (Oxford Dictionaries definition here ) manslamming :aggressive pavement action involving a man barging into people (often women)...