Language Log

The first couple of panels of today's SMBC:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "The thrower started hitting the bats too much, so the king of the game told him to leave and brought out another thrower from thrower jail."

A French friend who recently stayed with me for a while clearly experienced baseball in roughly this way (except without the focused attention).

The first two panels of today's SMBC:

Claire Landsbaum, "Research Confirms Using Periods in Texts Makes You Seem Pissed Off", ComPlex 10/3/2015:

Before texts, every sentence ended with a period. But with the advent of impersonal electronic communication, line breaks became a quicker and easier way to express the end of a thought. "The default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all," Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania​, told The New Republic. "In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like, 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'" In other words, because the period is a deliberate choice, including it is especially passive-aggressive.

The first two and last two panels of today's Doonesbury:

Today's SMBC, oddly out of phase with the seasons, starts this way:

A recent xkcd:

Mouseover title: "We had gathered that raw information, but had yet to put it all together."

Today's xkcd starts this way:

Today's Questionable Content:

What auto-replace — in a messaging app or your mind — do you need to turn off or turn on?

Today's PhD Comics:

Interesting that we haven't seen "datums", like "spectrums" and so on.

Today's xkcd:

Today's SMBC:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And …"