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October 31, 2011 @ 8:34 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Linguistic history
A couple of days ago, The Telegraph quoted an actor and a television producer emitting typically brainless "Kids Today" plaints about how modern modes of communication, especially Twitter, are degrading the English language, so that "the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us", and "words are getting shortened". I spent a […]
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October 28, 2011 @ 6:22 pm
· Filed under Humor, Language and culture
Lucy Jones, "Ralph Fiennes blames Twitter for 'eroding' language", The Telegraph 10/28/2011: Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival awards in Old Street, London, the actor said that modern language "is being eroded" and blamed "a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter." "Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so […]
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June 22, 2011 @ 9:26 am
· Filed under Language and the media
Or maybe it's a writing comprehension test. Anyhow, it's past the jump.
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November 15, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
· Filed under Taboo vocabulary
The Taboo Desk here at Language Log Plaza is piled high with reports about taboo language and offensive language — about the classification of particular expressions as obscene/profane or otherwise offensive, about the open use of such expressions, about ways people avoid them, and so on. Now, on the front page of the New York […]
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November 11, 2009 @ 7:14 am
· Filed under Linguistic history
Answering a reader's question about somebody vs. someone, Arnold Zwicky speculated yesterday that "you'd find all sorts of interesting variation according to the location / age / sex / class etc. of the speaker, genre, formality of the context, date when the corpora were collected, and so on". In the comments, Jerry Friedman suggested that […]
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May 22, 2009 @ 8:22 am
· Filed under Language and the media
Jorge Cham at PhD Comics follows up on his analysis of the science news cycle:
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May 2, 2009 @ 9:40 am
· Filed under Humor, Peeving
In previous postings on word rage, we've noted (mock) threats of punching, slicing, bludgeoning, shooting, hanging, and lightning strikes. Commenting on Ron Charles, "1 Millions Words! But Who's Counting?", Washington Post, 4/29/2009, someone identifying himself as andrewsalomon added judicially-sanctioned electrocution: I don't know anything about the million-word business, but is there any chance of getting […]
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June 30, 2024 @ 1:34 pm
· Filed under Intonation, Sociolinguistics
Hilary Hanson, "Paris Hilton's Split-Second Voice Change Leaves People Absolutely Stunned", Huffpost 6/29/2024: Paris Hilton floored social media users this week by seamlessly shifting her vocal register midsentence as she spoke before Congress. […] When Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) asked Hilton for her thoughts on incorporating mental health care into new legislation, Hilton responded first […]
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December 27, 2023 @ 4:56 pm
· Filed under Language and politics
My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate […]
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May 21, 2023 @ 5:32 am
· Filed under Artificial languages, Romanization, Transcription
We have seen ChatGPT tell stories (and variants of the stories it tells), fancify Coleridge's famous poem on Xanadu, pose a serious challenge to the Great Firewall of China, mimic VHM, write Haiku, and perform all manner of amazing feats. In a forthcoming post, we will witness its efforts to translate Chinese poetry. Today, we […]
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December 18, 2022 @ 10:00 am
· Filed under Lexicon and lexicography, Word of the year, Words words words
[This is a guest post by Martin Woesler in response to this post: "German lexicographic richness" (10/11/21)] Let me share the language feeling of a German with you. As you may have assumed, if a German explains feelings, he does it with a set of rules: German wordcraziness rule # 1: Yes, there is a […]
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November 13, 2022 @ 10:15 am
· Filed under Language and art, Language and culture
Illustrating Ben Tarnoff's 11/11/2022 NY Review of Books article "In the Hothouse", Paul Klee's 1922 painting Die Zwitscher-Maschine ("The Twittering Machine"):
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June 21, 2022 @ 4:47 am
· Filed under Etymology, Language and culture, Language and food, Language and sports, Language and the law
In the previous post ("Oil: a partial paradigm" [6/19/22)]), we have been discussing the origins and ramifications of the derivation of the word "oil" from the ancient Greek word for olive. The last comment (before I wrote this post), by Coby, states: "Spanish also has the word óleo, which can mean either oil paint or […]
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