David Brooks may be a fantasy-nonfiction author manqué, but Jorge Luis Borges has set a standard in that space that's hard to match. From "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in Ficciones: There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified […]
Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016: Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses […]
Silas Lesnick, "An ensemble cast has come together for Whitney Cummings’ The Female Brain movie", comingsoon.net 8/17/2016: Black Bicycle Entertainment has today announced the ensemble cast for their upcoming The Female Brain movie, which marks the directorial debut of Whitney Cummings. Cummings herself will also star in the film, which she co-wrote alongside Neal Brennan, […]
Dean Baker, "Brooks and Marcus on PBS News: Getting Just About Everything Wrong on the Economy", Beat The Press 8/3/2013: The PBS Newshour won the gold medal for journalistic malpractice on Friday by having David Brooks and Ruth Marcus tell the country what the Friday jobs report means. Brooks and Marcus got just about everything […]
"Hippie punching" is in the news around the world these days — Paul Krugman, "Macroeconomic Hippie-Punching", NYT 5/26/2013; "Gordon Campbell on the govt's latest bout of hippie punching", Scoop Media NZ 5/27/2013; "« Hippie punching » et puis tant pis !", L'est-éclair 5/28/2013; One definition is offered by Michael Berube, "Libya and the Left", The Point, […]
Paul Krugman ("The Sloppiness Syndrome", NYT 5/22/2013): So what is it with New Republic alumni? First Michael Kinsley, then Charles Lane, weigh in with defenses of austerity that aren’t just wrong, but painfully ill-informed. Kinsley not only makes a really bad analogy between current events and the 1970s, he seems not to know anything about […]
David Brooks has found a congenial story in Google ngrams — or rather, in three papers about ngrammatical history, which he interprets to show that virtue, discipline, and concern for the common good have been declining, while subjectivity and concern for self-esteem have increased ("What Our Words Tell Us", NYT 5/20/2013)). Brooks doesn't cite or […]
Our lengthy discussion of Chinese word(s) for nerd has suffered from some lack of clarity about the English word, which has a variety of senses, referring to various aspects of complex social and psychological phenomena. And both the word-meanings and the social realities have changed over time. In the Op-Ed that started us off — […]
A couple of years ago, Geoff Pullum put it this way: Long-time Language Log readers will recall that we have often said here before that whenever someone says that the X people have no word for Y in their language you should put your hand on your wallet — to make sure it's still there. […]
Reader ST writes to draw our attention to Bryan Garner's 1/2/2012 note on "regardless whether": Language-Change Index — “regardless whether”* for “regardless of whether”: Stage 2. *Invariably inferior forms.
François Gonon et al., "Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder", PLoS ONE 9/12/2012: Methods: We focused on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Using Factiva and PubMed databases, we identified 47 scientific publications on ADHD published in the 1990s and soon echoed by […]
Yesterday, I tried replicating one of the experiments in Jean M. Twenge et al., "Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008", PLoS One 7/10/2012, and got results that seem to be significantly at variance with their conclusions ("Textual narcissism", 7/13/2012). This morning, I thought I'd try getting a replication with word counts from […]