Language Log

The word "exceedances" occurs 7 times in this relatively short article:

"Lead in water at Perth Children's Hospital no risk to patient safety, WA health minister says"
Mya Kordic, ABC News (Australia), 9/10/25

Here are two examples:

"Exceedances are decommissioned while they undergo remediation," Ms Hammat said.

"I have been advised by the Chief Health Officer that there is no risk to the safety of patients or staff as a result of these exceedances."

Or maybe "adverbial noun"? Or "adverbial verb"? Anyhow, "Long-closed Calif. mountain route surprise reopens after years", SFGate 9/2/2025:

A long-shuttered stretch of highway that cuts straight through Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles has finally reopened.

A roughly 10-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway, which runs roughly east-west through the national forest for over 60 miles from the wealthy suburb of La Cañada Flintridge to the small mountain town of Wrightwood, reopened with little notice on Friday after being closed for several years. Before the surprise return on Friday, the portion of the two-lane highway had been closed since the winter of 2022-2023, when “relentless storms” collapsed roadways, caused rockslides and damaged retaining walls, according to Caltrans.

There's a big fuss and furor over the logo change at Cracker Barrel:

Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

Over the years, we've taken many self-appointed usage authorities to task for ignorant pronouncements presenting their personal reactions as facts of the standard language, or even as logical necessities. But everybody has similar reactions, and the point is not to deny the existence of usage conventions, or to pretend that you don't ever perceive something as a violation.  As in all areas of cultural judgment, however, it's a good idea to examine the foundations of your responses, because sometimes it turns out that you're wrong about the facts or the logic.

I recently documented an experience of that general kind in a June 20 post "Incredulous, incredible, whatever…", where a usage that I perceived as a malapropism turned out to go back to Shakespeare.

This morning's example is even more surprising to me — "cut and dry" where I expected "cut and dried".

I thought this use of incredulous in a recent Forbes article was a malapropism for incredible:

If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers. [emphasis added]

From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025:

More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal.

“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post in a podcast broadcast on Wednesday.

Email from a reader:

In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business, I have noticed a regular use of the FUTURE tense, when the present would perfectly suffice. Sometimes, but not always, this is combined with telling me what I WILL WANT to do. To wit,

– "you WILL WANT TO ____"
– "the beverages WILL BE on the back of the menu"

There is nothing "wrong" grammatically or logically with any of this (as if there could be). It is perfectly accurate and cromulent. But these forms are relatively new, I conjecture. Even a little jarring.

I can posit my own hypotheses regarding how and why these usages increased in prevalence in recent tears. Is there a literature on it, perhaps already covered by Language Log?

Elizabeth Ribbens, "How the use of a word in the Guardian has gotten some readers upset", The Guardian 6/4/2025:

‘Got’ was changed during the editing of an opinion piece, leading to correspondence lamenting a slide into American English. But language isn’t a fortress.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In a letter published the next day, a reader asked teasingly if this use of “gotten” – and another writer’s reference to a “faucet” – were signs the Guardian had fallen into line with Donald Trump’s demand that news agencies adopt current US terminology, such as referring to the “Gulf of America”.

Another, who wrote to me separately, had first seen the article in the print edition and expected subeditors (or copy editors, if you wish) would eventually catch up and remove “gotten”, which “is not a word in British English”. She was surprised to find the online version not only unchanged but with the phrase repeated in the headline.

Donald Trump's recent West Point commencement address has gotten plenty of media coverage. But what I noticed was something linguistic, which the commentariat unsurprisingly ignored, namely a violation of expected modifier order (in a passage around 45:46 in the cited recording):

I went through a very tough time with some very
radicalized sick people
and I say I was investigated more than the great
late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster
he was a very hardened criminal
I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone
and now I'm talking to you as president can you believe this
can you believe it

Yann LeCun's evaluation of political versus linguistic errors:

 

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I've lost a considerable amount of sleep over these two words, not just because they both have nine letters and look almost the same, differing only by a single consonant, but even more so because, while they both signify something bad or undesirable about the way situations unfold or how people behave toward others, they imply the opposite in the manner these odious actions are carried out, but have no obvious clues about their usage.

In the discussion of "The cost of commas", RfP wrote  "I would be interested in seeing figures for the difference in the relative use of periods between Franklin and Lodge, in relation to the use of commas and semicolons".

It's obvious that the secular trend in English towards shorter sentences will tend to reduce the frequency of periods, at least in the case of works where periods are rarely used as part of numbers and similar non-phrasal symbols. And therefore the frequency of commas relative to periods should increase, if a similar number of commas were divided by a smaller number of periods. That's actually the opposite of what we see, presumably because each longer sentence in the older works was divided up by a larger number of periods:

And as we'll see, commas may also simply have gone out of fashion in the middle of the 20th century.