WONDERFUL WORDS AT WINCHESTER - MEET SUSIE DENT

On the evening of 11 October 2018 at the Stripe Theatre at the University of Winchester, the English Project will present its Annual English Language Day Lecture. Doors open at 17.45.  The lecture begins at 18.15.

‘Women and the English Language: A Conversation with Susie Dent’

A conversation with Susie Dent, one of England’s greatest lexicographers, will explore the way in which women use the English Language and in which the English language uses women. Questions will be put to Susie by the English Project and the Audience. Come armed with questions, but also send us questions in advance by return of this message.

In 1918, the British granted votes for the first time to women. In 2018, the Centennial year of that event, the English Project has been reflecting on women and the English language.

The lecture is free, but you will need to register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-english-project-presents-women-and-the-english-language-a-conversation-with-susie-dent-tickets-47843381843

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Susie Dent is a leading English-language lexicographer, best known as the resident dictionary expert and adjudicator on Channel 4’s long-running game show Countdown. She has written fourteen books on the English language, on subjects as varied as language change, dialect, word origins, and tribal conversation.. Susie is also an experienced broadcaster and has presented and appeared on many radio and television programmes, including Americanize for Radio 4, which examined the history of British antipathy towards US English. Her special interest is etymology, and the secret lives hidden behind the most ordinary of words. 

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English Language Day. On 13 October 1362, a Westminster Parliament was convened that approved a Statute of Pleading that permitted the use of the English language in Parliament on the grounds that French was ‘much unknown’ in England. The Normans, Angevins and Plantagenets had up to that time ruled England in French. Then English was a forbidden and a despised language, but 13 October 1362 saw English on its way to becoming the twenty-first century’s Global Language. For more on this and much else related, read the English Project’s History of the English Language in 100 Places by Bill Lucas and Christopher Mulvey. See: www.englishproject.org.