Bloomberg reports (rather delicately) that the name of France's new prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, is causing a bit of problem when it is transliterated into Arabic: "When spoken, his family name is colloquial Arabic in many countries for the third-person singular possessive form of the male sex organ." France's foreign ministry has nipped this problem […]
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 […]
Yesterday's Morning Edition took up the question of how "Bribery Accusations Hurt Wal-Mart's Stock Price". The segment takes the form of a conversation between NPR's Chris Arnold and Charles Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, in which a metaphorically sticky wicket plays an important role. Like many Americans who […]
I applaud Mark for taking on the question of left- and right-wing linguistic moralism. It encourages me to add some snippets from the disorganized drawer of Thoughts I have on this topic, some of them from stuff I wrote but never published. I leave the insertion of transitions as an exercise for the reader. In […]
The latest xkcd: (As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)
Nina Totenberg, "Skip the Legalese And Keep It Short, Justices Say", Morning Edition, 6/12/2011: Most of the U.S. Supreme Court's work is in writing. The words on the page become the law of the land, but the justices have no uniform approach to the way they do that job. Indeed, each seems to have his […]
William Germano, "What are books good for?", The Chronicle Review, 9/26/2010: Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious […]
One of the secrets of Language Log is that because of its lack of any arrangement for revenue (aaaaggghh! how could we have forgotten something as vital as income?) its writers have to moonlight doing other jobs, just to make the rent or mortgage payments. We all have jobs that we do in the odd […]
Ian Best writes: Since it was first used by Palin, and then commented upon by the media, I've heard the word [refudiate] used a couple of times in everyday speech. Both times it was used in a playful, ironic way, as if the person knew it was a Palin-invented, non-legitimate word. I.e. "You need to […]
Today's New York Times has an obituary for James J. Kilpatrick ("James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice, Dies at 89", by Richard Goldstein) that focuses, as the headline promises, on Kilpatrick's career as a conservative voice in newspaper columns, books, and television appearances. In passing, Goldstein mentions Kilpatrick's (often decidedly peevish) career as a critic of […]
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When Paul Grice drafted his maxims for cooperative conversation, he didn't have in mind that we should get upset when people violate them. On the contrary, the whole idea was to use apparent violations as the basis for reasoning about conversational implicatures, the things that people obviously mean but don't literally say. Still, people do […]
Janet Randall wrote: I am faced with a query from someone at a pretty high level at Public TV who is objecting to an employee's use of the preposition "acrosst". I looked for some dialect information about this variant of "across" but haven't been able to find it on language log, or anywhere else, without […]