Allan Metcalf has done a remarkable thing over on Lingua Franca, in the post you can see here: he has announced a contest in which readers have to think up new fake prescriptive rules ("The rule has to be a brand new one, not announced in any previous usage manual, but—and this is the hard […]
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Language Log readers who have not seen The Very Model of an Amateur Grammarian on "The Stroppy Editor" should check it out. Sing it (or imagine it sung), fairly fast, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I am the very model of a modern major-general" from The Pirates of Penzance — the same tune […]
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Not Chinese. Do you understand? This has long been a cabbage of contention, but make no mistake about it: fermented kimchee / kimchi (gimchi 김치 (IPA [kim.tɕʰi]) (lit., "soaked [in their own juices of fermentation] vegetables") is not the same thing as pickled paocai / pao tsai 泡菜 (lit., "soaked [in brine] vegetables"). Kimchee and […]
Rick Rubenstein commented on yesterday's post ("What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?"): Are there any proven therapies available for folks like me who, despite seeing the light decades ago, can't keep from wincing at "violations" of prescriptivist rules ingrained (mostly self-ingrained) during childhood? I want to be totally unfazed by "The team with the […]
An introduction and guide to my series of posts “Corpora and the Second Amendment” is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. COFEA and COEME: lawcorpus.byu.edu. This […]
In "Which justifies what?" (7/3/2019) and "Thematic spoonerisms" (7/14/2019), we noted cases where writers exchanged noun phrases so as to produce literally nonsensical propositions: the inconvenience didn't justify the cause instead of the cause didn't justify the inconvenience, and ampicillin is resistant to multiple strains of U.T.I.s instead of multiple strains of U.T.I.s are resistant […]
An introduction and guide to this series of posts is available here. The corpus data can be downloaded here. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. New URL for COFEA and COEME: https://lawcorpus.byu.edu. Having dealt in my last post with how bear arms was ordinarily used and understood in 18th-century […]
A few weeks ago I attended the last afternoon of Scale By The Bay 2018 ("So much for Big Data", 11/18/2018), and as a result, this arrived today by email: We had a blast at Scale by the Bay. We hope you did, too. As a sponsor, the organizer has shared your email with us. […]
Rachel Paige King ("The Draconian Dictionary Is Back", The Atlantic 8/5/2018) suggests that lexicographers might be (re)turning to prescriptivism: Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. […] The standard way of describing these two approaches in lexicography is to call them […]
Last week the Washington Post published an op-ed by Michael Anton arguing that the United States should do away with birthright citizenship—the principle that anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, even if their parents are foreign-born noncitizens. The op-ed has attracted a lot of attention from people on both the left […]
One of the most well-known pieces of lexicographic history is the controversy that greeted the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Whereas the predecessor of W3, Webster’s Second New etc., had been regarded as authoritatively prescriptive, W3 was condemned in the popular media for its descriptive approach, the widespread perception of which can be […]
As we enter the second half of the 15th year since we started Language Log, we've been reflecting on the past and planning for the future.