In the latest episode of "Sam & Cat," a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, the plot takes a lexicographical turn. As Nickelodeon describes it, Sam and Cat make a bet with the annoying older brother of a babysitting client that "lumpatious" is a real word. When they discover it is not, they must figure out how […]
…has been featured in the last three Big Nate strips, starting with this one:
Tom Chivers, the Telegraph's assistant comment editor, has posted some comments of his own on the linguistic side of a recent British parliamentary controversy ("Nadine Dorries, linguistic pioneer", The Telegraph 9/12/2011). David Cameron said something about Ms. Dorries that some perceived as offensive; he later apologized to her, and she responded: I don’t for one […]
For the past couple of weeks, I've been getting a bunch of curious email messages that start like these: Thank you for contacting the comics and features department at The Washington Post. Even though this is an automatic reply to inform you that we have received your comment, we still want you to know that […]
Since BP is "refusing to confirm the widespread reports" that CEO Tony Hayward is just about to be fired, I assume he will be out by the end of the day (if you get up in the morning and find your employer is refusing to confirm reports that you are on the way out, start […]
Sex and the City 2 premiered in London last night. Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a black strapless dress from the house of her favorite British designer, and what she told her fans provided another interesting example of what Mark Liberman noted in a recent post on fashion talk: There's only one person I could […]
Language Log readers may recall the link I gave to the Vulture Reading Room discussion of The Lost Symbol on the New York Magazine website, where I made some comments on the extraordinarily heavy use Dan Brown's book makes of redundant (either pointless or already implicit) attributive modifiers. I illustrated from an early passage about […]
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The Reverend Angela Tilby ended her scandalously unresearched little "Thought for the Day" talk of 1 October 2009 (part of which I have already discussed in this recent post) by suggesting that during the British political party conference season (i.e., right about now) we should try taking a blue pencil and editing out all the […]
If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away […]
A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?": 'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me – 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. […]
Near the end of 1801, his first year as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson got a letter from Robert Patterson, professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, containing a page encrypted according to a new method. Patterson described his cryptosystem in detail, and boasted that without the key — which he didn't […]
Orwell's Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law. Furthermore I just noticed that its final law is rather curious. We'll get to that shortly. Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases […]
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-first issue: "Placing Western Coins Near the Deceased in Ancient China: The Origin of a Custom," by Pin LYU: ABSTRACT: This article traces the custom in ancient China of placing Western coins in proximity to corpses during burial. Academic attention has focused on the origin […]