Welcome back!
First, an apology is in order. I’m sure our fanbase of 5-6 dedicated readers (Joe and I included) has been wondering over the course of the summer why we haven’t published any new articles for ages. Well, believe it or not, BTSB has been enjoying a well-deserved summer vacation. Now, I know we didn’t announce that we’re taking a hiatus, but I’m sure even the most dull-witted of you got the jist after staring …

The Helsinki Corpus of British English Dialects (HD) is a corpus project initiated in the early 1970s by Professor Tauno F. Mustanoja from the English Department, Helsinki, and Professor Harold Orton from the University of Leeds. The corpus contains over a million words of transcribed dialect speech. Covered are the rural regions of Cambridgeshire, Devon, Isle of Ely, Somerset and Suffolk, all recorded in the 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the urban regions …

The annual grant of 1,000 euros was awarded to Ms. Susanne Setälä for her thesis work on American poet Lucille Clifton.

It was the autumn of 2003. The student organization of the English Department at the University of Helsinki, named SUB, had convened for the first time in the autumn term. The meeting was called because SUB was on the verge of disaster: funding had been cut short, the student union of the University, HYY, had made an effort to root out all illegal activities surrounding her various factions and this time it was SUB’s turn …

Let me take you on a philosophical journey. And before you nod off, let me emphasise that there is a point to all this. You see, there’s one thing about my academic studies that has always bothered me a lot. But before I actually tell you what it is, I’ll bore you off with some musings.
I’m sitting here, watching my computer screen. I’m looking at the digital version of a blank canvas, which is slowly …