Language Log

Somehow a discussion of language universals ends up with fart noises:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

In today's Doonesbury, Zonker riffs on the "no word for X" meme:

There are a bunch of insulting sk- words — scummy, scurvy, scruffy, scuzzy, sketchy come to mind. And everybody, even a snoot, seems to like negative-vibe phonetic symbolism. So if you try to make up a new word on this general pattern, say "skudgy", you'll probably find that many others have been there before you: "…by the next time we drag them out for bath-time play, we find that a skudgy sort of water is dispelled from the interior"; "The poet noted that the garage had a 'skudgy down-to-earth-ness'". Maybe skudgy is just a portmanteau of scummy and sludgy, or maybe we need to recognize the resonance with other words like scuzzy and dingy; but in any case, it's out there, waiting to be re-invented.

And that's how I reacted to the last word in today's Tank McNamara:

In today's Get Fuzzy, we learn about Bucky Katt's extension of the Principle of Explosion to the semantics of questions:

9 Chickweed Lane, for June 15, illustrates something about prescriptivist pain:

Over the years, we've discussed a number of different sorts of conditionals, including bleached conditionals,  concessive conditionals, and baseball conditionals.

But as far as I can recall, we haven't discussed relevance conditionals, as (I think) exemplified in this morning's Stone Soup:

From Ryan Pagelow's cartoon Pressed:

Correspondent Rory Finn, originally a foreign correspondent (before the paper shut the foreign desks down), now gets shunted from one desk to another.

(Hat tip to JC Dill.)

Rick Detorie's One Big Happy for 10/27/2008:

We find it amusing when an apparently logical generalization about word formation goes badly wrong, as Joe's idiosyncratic inference does in this strip.

Or fathoms per hogshead, as in this Language Log posting from last month. Here's Zippy's take:

[Addendum: Richard Pérez writes to say that Zippy's "eighteenth of an inch" answer is way off, at least if if you understand the length of a nanosecond to be the distance light travels in a nanosecond (which is close to 30 centimeters, or between 11 and 12 inches). Grace Hopper (of computer fame) used to illustrate this fact in her public lectures with lengths of wire of the appropriate size — a demonstration that Pérez remembers from his high school days.]

Today's Get Fuzzy (click on the image for a larger version):

My immediate reaction was that "Wait, what?" is an idiom characteristic of American youth — 20-somethings and teenagers.

Rob Balder continues to display his delicate yet often dark and naughty linguistic genius. The latest strip is wonderful. Look at the sensitivity, in that last panel, to the currents of contemporary journalistic and educational phraseology about controversies like creationism, and the corrupting force of dangerous misinformation. Deliciously, wickedly funny. No, I'm not reproducing the strip here; you owe it to yourself to click through and browse his site.

Another Zits cartoon on this topic:

Rhymes With Orange plays with less/fewer:

This is a familiar topic here on Language Log. Some previous postings:

ML, 11/15/06: If it was good enough for King Alfred the Great… (link)

AZ, 8/10/08: 10 English majors or less (link)

AZ, 8/31/08: More on less (link)

AZ, 9/4/08: Still more on less (link)