Language Log

Following on Mark's "Literacy: peasants and philosophers" (10/10/25) yesterday, also a number of posts on this subject that we have written in the past (see the bibliography), i herewith offer an account of myth and literacy:

Memories within myth
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem. They are scientific records
By Patrick Nunn, Aeon (4/6/23)

This is a long, richly documented article, from which I will take only a few representative selections.  It begins:

In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.

Today's SMBC starts with this panel:

Recently I came upon the following quotation from the Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1905-1945):

Photograph taken at the Ningbo airport: those items are not allowed to be taken into the city of Ningbo.

zìyuàn fàngqì wùpǐn tóuqì xiāng

自愿放弃物品投弃箱

"disposal bin for items voluntarily discarded"

For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in  how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, "Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article's sub-head is  "It is not the road to serfdom that awaits—but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt".

[This is a guest post by Chau Wu]

The word 奴隷 Jpn dorei (ドレイ) / Tw lô·-lē ‘slave’ is of great interest to me. My study of West-to-East lexical loans suggests that the origin of this word is Ancient Greek δοȗλos (doȗlos, m.) and δοȗλα (doȗla, f.), which mean ‘slave’. The figure below is a funerary stele of Mnesarete, daughter of Socrates (not the philosopher), showing a female servant facing her deceased mistress. There are some other terms for slave in Ancient Greek, depending on the context, but doȗlos and doȗla are historically the most commonly used, from Mycenean, Homer, Classical, Koine, down to Modern Greek.

In earlier posts and comments ("Between you and I"; "Barriers between you and I"), there have been many opinions about the possibility of  various English subject and object pronouns in the two positions of "between X and Y".  So I've done a quick tally of  counts from five of the English-language corpora at English-Corpora.org:

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
News on the Web (NOW)
Corpus of American Soap Operas
The TV Corpus
The Movie Corpus

(Though for now I've tested only the patterns in which Y = I/me.)

In "'Between you and I'" (10/5/2025), I quoted three theories that Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage offers as possible explanations for the confusion over "between you and I" vs. "between you and me". The third of those theories cites Noam Chomsky, whose work is not usually part of usage discussion:

Another possible explanation (unnoticed by the comentaros) comes from the linguist Noam Chomsky. In his Barriers, 1986, he says that compound phrases like you and I are barriers to the assignment of grammatical case. This means that between can assign case only to the whole phrase and not to the individual words that make it up. Thus the individual pronouns are free to be nominative or objective or even reflexives. Chomsky's theory would also explain some other irregularities in pronoun use (See PRONOUNS); it's the best that has been offered so far.

I expressed skepticism about this theory, "for reasons to be discussed another time".

How Chinese Characters Almost Died 

Once again, Julesy tells it like it is.

…as AntC said in a comment on yesterday's "Different from/than/to?" post.

For example, different was borrowed from French différent. But the French use the preposition de with that adjective, e.g. "Pourquoi les Québécois ont-ils un accent différent de celui des Français?". And de is mostly translated as "of", but no English speaker would ever say "X is different of Y".

Or so I thought — but COCA has 72 hits for "different of". Most of them are from contexts like "different of course", but others seem genuine, like this one:

And in another, filmed by Mecklem in 1997, Roman shares an appreciation for the "slowness" of painting, in both the creation and appreciation of it. "You can look at it hundreds of times over the years and you can eventually eke out something, some meaning out of it," he said. "That type of attitude is so different of the mega-visual culture that we have of just quick cuts… It would be good to bring back the activity of painting, of observing painting, and appreciating painting."

Several commenters on yesterday's post "'Between you and I'", starting with Martin Schwartz, go back and forth (or round and round?) about different from vs. different than vs. different to.

So I can't resist quoting the entry for different from, different than, different to from Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage:

We have about 80 commentators in our files who discourse on the propriety of different than or different to. The amount of comment—thousands and thousands of words—might lead you to believe that there is a very complicated or subtle problem here, but there is not. These three phrases can be very simply explained: different from is the most common and is standard in both British and American usage; different than is standard in American and British usage, especially when a clause follows than, but is more frequent in American; different to is standard in British usage but rare in American usage. 

[This is a guest post by Randoh Sallihall]

Analysis of Google search data for 2025 reveals the most searched for slang words in America.