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 […]
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 […]
Or maybe it's a writing comprehension test. Anyhow, it's past the jump.
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 […]
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 […]
Jorge Cham at PhD Comics follows up on his analysis of the science news cycle:
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 […]
April is Autism Acceptance Month: Autism Acceptance Month celebrates and honors the experiences and identities of Autistic individuals. It emphasizes understanding, inclusion, and support, moving beyond awareness towards meaningful acceptance. On April 16, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. put out this not-very-supportive set of claims about Autism: [The news conference that this was taken from is […]
There has been quite a ruckus over the impending ban on TikTok, a mainland Chinese short-form video hosting service, and its supposed replacement by REDnote (aka Xiaohongshu [XHS], aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote, aka RED), a Chinese social networking and e-commerce platform. I think that much / most of the commotion is sheer hype […]
Previous LLOG coverage: "AI on Rs in 'strawberry'", 8/28/2024; "'The cosmic jam from whence it came'", 9/26/2024. Current satire: Alberto Romero, "Report: OpenAI Spends Millions a Year Miscounting the R’s in ‘Strawberry’", Medium 11/22/2024. OpenAI, the most talked-about tech start-up of the decade, convened an emergency company-wide meeting Tuesday to address what executives are calling […]
Below are two lists of nominations for Japanese buzzword of the year. Each has 30 entries, and from each list one will be chosen as the respective winner. Since the two lists are already quite long and rich, I will keep my own comments (mostly at the bottom and focusing on phoneticization) to a minimum. […]
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 […]