...from this week's Plain English mailing:


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Seven Austrian doctors, brought in to fill a shortage of staff in Barnsley and Doncaster, have been given a guide to local dialect.

The booklet, 'Nips to Gut Rot, or a Glossary of Yorkshire Medical Terms', is intended to help the doctors make sense of phrases that don't appear in any academic textbook.

Among the phrases covered are 'mardy gob oil' (mouth problems), 'gipping' (vomiting) and 'gripes' (stomach pains).

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Most of us will at some point note the irony that, before you can check a word's spelling in a dictionary, you need to know how to spell it so that you can find the listing. The latest edition of the Bloomsbury English Dictionary, published this month, aims to solve this problem.

As well as the standard listings, it also lists the incorrect versions of a thousand commonly mis-spelt words (with a note pointing the reader towards the correct version).

According to the dictionary's editor Dr Kath Rooney, the ten most common incorrect versions are:

1) suppose to
2) caffiene
3) recieve
4) seperate
5) adress
6) occured
7) definately
8) therefor
9) usefull
10) transfered

***