Language Log

This morning's question:

I'm an ESL textbook editor in Korea, and a grammar dispute has come down to one question: is "What do you say that we get together tonight?" grammatical, with "that" included (vs. the more common zero-complementizer "What do you say we…")?

My understanding is "that" is simply optional here, not ungrammatical.

Email from JK:

My daughter remarked that on several occasions recently she has heard presumably college-educated people use the word “I’s”, in a sentence like "I just picked up Margaret and I’s cat from the vet."

I'm guessing the reason for this jarring (to me) usage is that the sentence could be more logically parsed as

I just picked up Margaret and (my cat) from the vet  than as
I just picked up (Margaret and my) cat from the vet.

The brain turns to I just picked up Margaret and I’s cat from the vet as a solution because because Margaret and I is a strong connection like my cat, and it's encountered first in the sentence.

So it's parsed as I just picked up (Margaret and I)’s cat from the vet.

That sounds awful, but is it acceptable usage (obligatory SMBC reference)?

Bob Shackleton sent a link to this headline: "After 700 Years Underwater Divers Recovered 80-Ton Blocks from the Long-Lost Lighthouse of Alexandria", ZME Science 7/5/2026. His comment: "That’s a long time for a diver to stay underwater…"

"Every Time Norway Scores at the World Cup the City of Bergen Trembles":

The city of Bergen, Norway, shook on the night of June 22–23, not because there was an earthquake or an unknown geological phenomenon. But because the Norwegian national team scored a goal during the 2026 World Cup. This curious phenomenon was reported by a team of researchers from the University of Bergen, who found that fan celebrations produce vibrations in the ground so intense they can be detected even by highly sensitive scientific instruments like seismometers.

Sima Kotecha, "Soham murderer Ian Huntley taken off life support, BBC understands", BBC 3/6/2026:

Soham murderer Ian Huntley is close to death after being taken off life support following an attack in prison, the BBC understands.

The 52-year-old has been in hospital since 26 February after being beaten over the head with a makeshift weapon at HMP Frankland in County Durham. The high security prison houses some of the most violent inmates.

Prison sources said Huntley was found lying in a pool of blood after the attack. He suffered significant head trauma from his injuries.

For the past couple of years, internet advertising has been promoting (increasingly unexpected) things to me as "tactical": tactical shorts, tactical pants, tactical belts, tactical gloves, tactical hoodies, … These are basically imitations of military garments (to be worn in action as opposed to on parade), and I guess if my internet profile were different, I'd see more ads for imitation military firearms, not just knives and sticks and flashlights. More recently, I've seen tactical ice scrapers and tactical scissors. And most recently (and absurdly?), tactical pajamas.

From Coby L:

I wonder if you can refer me to a discussion of the appropriateness of the very common omission of "the" when a person's name is preceded by their position or occupation and is not a title or rank (like Professor, Colonel or President). For example, linguist Mark Liberman, writer Stephen King and the like. (In The New Yorker it would almost certainly be "the linguist" etc.)

As regards titles, specifically relating to political positions and used as forms of address, the I have also wondered why some are usually preceded by Mr. or Madam (President, Speaker…) and others are not (Governor, Senator, Prime Minister…). Any insights?

Or does it even have a tail? 

Facebook post by David J. Loftus:

"The hottest new AI company is…Google?", CNN 11/29/2025, shows a slide telling us that Google Search is "Bringing Generative AI to more people than any product in the world":

Most words have different senses and meanings depending upon the context in which they are used, hence the need for multiple definitions in dictionaries.  Philip Taylor has come across this article about:

8 Words That Are Only Used in One Weirdly Specific Context
Think about it: have you ever heard someone say they had “extenuating errands”?
By Sam Hindman, Mental Floss (11/23/25)

In "Prepositionssss…" (9/2/2011), we quoted from the 1995 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage,

Members of the never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition school are still with us and are not reluctant to make themselves known…

This follows M-W's note that

…recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error or an offense against propriety. Fowler terms the idea a "cherished superstition."

And that same 2011 post ends with a list of links discussing the superstition's origin and progress, going back to John Dryden's 1672 attempt to demonstrate that "he is a better poet and playwright than Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare were".

Today I observed this superstition rising again from the grave.

An email recently informed me that the American Psychological Association has created an online version of the APA Style Guide (technically the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition, and that Penn's library has licensed it. A quick skim turned up a prescriptive rule that's new to me, forbidding the use of commas to separate conjoined that-clauses unless there are at least three of them:

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.)