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November 20, 2020 @ 1:00 pm
· Filed under Snowclones
[This is a guest post by Scott de Brestian] I am an avid Language Log reader, and so am familiar with two ongoing series that your blog has – first, the posts debunking the “Eskimos (or people X) have unusually many words for snow” myth (which I believe drew me to your blog in the […]
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January 23, 2011 @ 3:09 pm
· Filed under Language and the media
An unusually fine example in Rachel Donadio, "Surreal: A Soap Opera Starring Berlusconi", NYT 1/22/2011: It is not always easy to translate between Italian and American sensibilities. There is no good English word for “veline,” the scantily clad Vanna White-like showgirls who smile and prance on television, doing dance numbers even in the middle of […]
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January 28, 2009 @ 10:56 pm
· Filed under Snowclones
Responding to the popularity of this morning's post on the politico-lexical economy of fair, here's a list of some earlier LL posts on aspects of the No Word for X meme and its rhetorical deployment [updated for some later ones as well…]: "No word for 'runoff'?", 12/23/2020 "'No words for mental health'", 9/8/2020 "Two few […]
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August 12, 2022 @ 3:17 pm
· Filed under Language and the media
Earlier today, Victor Mair was naive enough to believe a BBC "No word for X" story, and spread some of its misinformation in his post "No 'no'". He cited "The language that doesn't use 'no'", by Eileen McDougall, BBC (8/9/22); and at least in the aspect that Victor (and the headline) featured, that article is […]
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December 23, 2020 @ 1:24 pm
· Filed under Language and politics
Candice Norwood, "In battle for the Senate, Georgia organizers fight to mobilize voters of color", PBS News Hour 12/3/2020: For Susana Durán, Georgia State director for the civic engagement group Poder Latinx, informing voters about the race starts with the basics. “What is a runoff? There’s no Spanish language word for runoff,” Durán said. “I’m […]
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September 8, 2020 @ 6:19 am
· Filed under Language and culture
Esha Mitra, "India didn't prioritize mental health before Covid-19. Now it's paying the price", CNN 9/7/2020: No words for mental health [,,,] Experts say the historical reluctance to address mental health in India could be partly due to a lack of terminology. None of India's 22 languages have words that mean "mental health" or "depression." […]
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February 12, 2019 @ 6:54 pm
· Filed under Psychology of language, Words words words
At about 22:45 of the BBC discussion program The Moral Maze, Natasha Devon asserts Your browser does not support the audio element. Well it- I- again, one of the problems is language, actually, because in English, we have a very limited emotional vocabulary. When you look at other languages, they- they have a much broader amount of […]
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May 29, 2018 @ 5:08 am
· Filed under Language and culture, Language and politics, Snowclones
Tiger Webb writes to point out what he calls "a particularly toxic variant of the 'no word for X' meme" — from Paul Toohey, "The fight to protect indigenous children from abuse and neglect", News Corporation Australia 5/28/2018: NO WORD FOR RAPE Youth workers who spend time with roaming kids say they would never ask them […]
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March 11, 2018 @ 6:14 pm
· Filed under Language and culture, Language and the media
Earlier today, I discussed (or at least linked to) a serious econometric study arguing that the morphology of future time reference is meaningfully correlated — perhaps causally correlated — with the distribution of attitudes towards "willingness to take climate action" ("The latest on the Whorfian morphology of time"). A short time later, with the radio […]
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January 2, 2018 @ 8:31 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics
One of Matt Wuerker's 2017 political cartoons:
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July 20, 2017 @ 7:40 am
· Filed under Philosophy of Language
Yesterday Sharon Klein wrote to ask about the 2010 debate on Language and Thought hosted by The Economist: Some colleagues in other departments (notably in philosophy) have been asking to talk about the hypothesis, linguistic relativism, and the actual research around the issues. While I can (and have begun to) collect relevant papers for a […]
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February 12, 2017 @ 5:42 am
· Filed under Language and politics
Jonah Goldberg, "The Trouble with Nationalism", National Review 2/7/20 But I firmly believe that when we call the sacrifices of American patriots no different from the sacrifices of Spartans — ancient or modern — we are giving short shrift to the glory, majesty, and uniqueness of American patriotism and the American experiment. I’m reminded of […]
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January 24, 2017 @ 7:55 am
· Filed under Swear words, Taboo vocabulary
John Berenberg writes: An article by Joan Acocella in the February 9, 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books makes a 'no word for X' claim about Japanese and goes even further by quoting a native speaker who happily reports that learning to swear in English and Spanish allows him to say things […]
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