Language Log

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.)

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".

Politics aside, there's been some prescriptivist reaction to (part of) a Signal exchange between White House aides Anthony Salisbury and Patrick Weaver about the idea of deploying the 82nd Airborne to Portland. From  The Guardian :

“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver said.

For some people, it should be "between you and me", and "between you and I" is annoyingly wrong. I've gotten a couple of emails about this. So here's the (complicated) story.

The word "exceedances" occurs 7 times in this relatively short article:

"Lead in water at Perth Children's Hospital no risk to patient safety, WA health minister says"
Mya Kordic, ABC News (Australia), 9/10/25

Here are two examples:

"Exceedances are decommissioned while they undergo remediation," Ms Hammat said.

"I have been advised by the Chief Health Officer that there is no risk to the safety of patients or staff as a result of these exceedances."

Or maybe "adverbial noun"? Or "adverbial verb"? Anyhow, "Long-closed Calif. mountain route surprise reopens after years", SFGate 9/2/2025:

A long-shuttered stretch of highway that cuts straight through Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles has finally reopened.

A roughly 10-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway, which runs roughly east-west through the national forest for over 60 miles from the wealthy suburb of La Cañada Flintridge to the small mountain town of Wrightwood, reopened with little notice on Friday after being closed for several years. Before the surprise return on Friday, the portion of the two-lane highway had been closed since the winter of 2022-2023, when “relentless storms” collapsed roadways, caused rockslides and damaged retaining walls, according to Caltrans.