Language Log

RK sent in a link to a recent NYT sports story containing the sentence "Three batters later, the bases were loaded for Derek Jeter, but he flew out harmlessly to right field", and commented: I watched the game on tv and I can tell you that Derek's feet stayed firmly rooted on the ground.  I […]

A new book by Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, is published today. It opens with a prologue telling the story of the Obama inaugural oath flub, first told on Language Log in Ben Zimmer's piece "Adverbial placement in the oath flub" and the follow-up a day later in […]

Steven Pinker strikes back: "False Fronts in the Language Wars: Why New Yorker writers and others keep pushing bogus controversies", Slate 5/31/2012. Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the […]

Readers of The New Yorker might be getting the impression that the magazine has it in for a nefarious group of people known as "descriptivists." They're a terrible bunch, as far as I can tell. First came Joan Acocella's "The English Wars" in the May 14 issue (see Mark Liberman's posts, "Rules and 'rules'," "A […]

In The H-word, I quoted MWDEU  to the effect that the sentence-adverb use of hopefully "was [traditionally] available if writers needed it, but few writers did". I also quoted MWDEU quoting Copperud 1970 to the effect that the "rapid expansion of use of hopefully as a sentence-modifier" began "about 1960", and I exhibited a Google Ngrams plot […]

Yesterday, I discussed Joan Acocella's strange misreading of two essays introducing the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary ("Rules and 'rules'", 5/11/2012). John Rickford wrote that "the patterns of variation and change … are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions" — but Ms. Acocella took this defense of "vernaculars […]

Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer writes: Is there going to be a language log comment on the article "The English Wars"  in the current issue of the New Yorker?  I find it completely shocking to see that an author who purports to be writing about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism has so little understanding of the subject, and that […]

Noam Chomsky in the Guardian uses 'anticipate' to mean 'expect'. I thought language was his thing. — Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) May 1, 2012 Daniel Hannan is both a writer for The Telegraph and also Conservative MEP for South East England; and what he's complaining about is this passage (from "What next for Occupy?", The Guardian […]

According to Marissa Fessenden, "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech", Science Now 12/9/2011: A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low […]

"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a […]

Carolyn Johnson, "Embattled Harvard psychology professor resigns", 7/19/2011: Marc Hauser, a well-known Harvard psychology professor who has been on leave since an internal investigation found him guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct, is leaving the university. “Marc Hauser has resigned his position as a faculty member, effective August 1, 2011,” Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal […]

According to Stephen Cass, "Unthinking Machines", Technology Review 5/4/2011: Some of the founders and leading lights in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science gave a harsh assessment last night of the lack of progress in AI over the last few decades. During a panel discussion—moderated by linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker—that kicked […]

In Science today, there's yesterday, there was an article called "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books" [subscription required] by at least twelve authors (eleven individuals, plus "the Google Books team"), which reports on some exercises in quantitative research performed on what is by far the largest corpus ever assembled for humanities and […]