Language Log

John McIntyre's "Grammarnoir 7: 'The Corpus Had a Familiar Face'" is available at The Baltimore Sun.

At the start of the story, a thug with "fists the size of Westphalian hams and the cold, dead eyes of a community press content coach" strong-arms John's narrator into a big room "with a glass wall overlooking a formal garden. Around a large table sat half a dozen people: Jeans. T-shirts, mostly black. Bottles of imported water. Three-day stubble on every face. No women."

Matt Treyvaud forwarded this from the Lojban mailing list:

"Lojban changes to hanzi writing system" (4/1/15)

Some people complained that although the spelling in Lojban is very easy to grasp the grammar is not. So the committee for the development of Lojban (BPFK) decided to fix this issue and to make the spelling hard as well.  Especially for those people who are not familiar with hanzi (Chinese characters).

PhD comics for 3/25/2015:

Of course, email is "old school" in the sense of "15 years ago", since 20 or 25 years ago, most students didn't have an email account.

But anyhow, this can be a real-world problem, especially for large classes, since schools generally don't yet offer a utility for txting all the students enrolled in a given course, or at least offering them that option, and instructors still assume that email notices of one kind or another will be effective.

A month ago, we studied the enigma of "Anti-mouth-bowls" (3/1/15).  It was Jan Söhlke who had sent me a photograph of what were labeled "Anti-Mund-Schuessel" ("anti-mouth-bowl").  He mentioned that the same Viennese shop had other bowls with equally mystifying names and promised to go back and take pictures of them.  Jan has now delivered on his promise by sending the following photographs:

Via Jason Schrock on Twitter…

Hey @LanguageLog check it out pic.twitter.com/Hxh1ngD55y

— jason (@jason_schrock) April 2, 2015

Just a minor anatomical error in @USC's full-page NYT ad… via @mike_yassa pic.twitter.com/0IxFBzPuFN

— Mo Costandi (@mocost) April 1, 2015

Chinese have long been giving themselves some rather unusual English names.

V. K. Wellington Koo (famous diplomat [1888-1985]), AKA Koo Vi Kyuin, Ku Wei-chün, Gu Weijun

Cream (female author in Hong Kong)

Aplomb (male currently in Buffalo, New York)

IcyFire (female in Taiwan)

Achilles Fang (a teacher of mine)

Apollo Wu (a language learning software developer)

Every year when I go through the hundred plus files of applicants for our graduate program from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, I am tickled by the amazing names that Chinese choose for themselves.

For those who were interested in Mark's post on the curious question of when the -man suffix gets a reduced vowel (woman, fireman, madman, milkman, gunman, batman, Batman, caveman, postman, weatherman, etc.), and especially for those who commented on it, Ben Yagoda has now written insightfully on the topic over at Lingua Franca.

Oxford University Press has published the fourth edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The name "Fowler" has been retained as a source of prestige, but this is really the work of editor Jeremy Butterfield (as the third edition was the work of Robert Burchfield). Butterfield has already been getting some press attention for some of his more curmudgeonly reactions to points of modern usage. From The Times (UK), "Modern language makes dictionary compiler see, like, red" (3/31/15):

Readers fretful about crumbling standards will be relieved, and possibly amused, that the compiler of the latest edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage has admitted to being overcome by grumpiness at some of the 250 new entries.

Jeremy Butterfield said that he was unable to hide his disdain while writing entries such as "awesome", "challenging" and "issue" – all of which are classified as clichés. So annoyed was he by the use of "like" as verbal punctuation that he suggested violence may be an appropriate response.

Ooh, violence! Looks like it's the latest episode of word rage.

Two years ago I sent out an "SOS for DARE," that is, a plea for the indispensable Dictionary of American Regional English, which had run into funding troubles. Though DARE was granted a temporary reprieve, the latest news is more dire than ever.

Marc Johnson laid out the situation in an article for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The end may be near for one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's most celebrated humanities projects, the half-century-old Dictionary of American Regional English. In a few months, the budget pool will drain to a puddle. Layoff notices have been sent, eulogies composed…

Today's For Better or For Worse:

Ben Zimmer was recently in Pittsburgh, where he gave the keynote address at the American Copy Editors Society conference. He mentioned that one of the copy editors (Bill Walsh of the Washington Post) was confused by a sign for a new bar/lounge in Pittsburgh:

Social Tea House? Social Plus House? Social Unpronounced Symbol House? Social Thouse? #ACES2015 pic.twitter.com/fyoYNI3Lz3

— Bill Walsh (@TheSlot) March 28, 2015