Pedantry, Dr. Johnson said in the Rambler, is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. And learning is never so unseasonable as when its display impedes the workaday business of making sense. Take the sentence from The Economist that I ran across when I was writing my word-of-the-year piece for Fresh Air on "big data": Yet even […]
As soon as I heard that the 5th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) had come out, I rushed to the nearest Barnes & Noble bookstore (yes, they still exist — that was Borders that closed) and plunked down two Bens (hundred dollar bills) to buy three copies at $60 […]
A brief news flash from Edinburgh: at the Winter Graduation Ceremony on Wednesday 28 November the University of Edinburgh will be conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters upon Eric P. Hamp, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, for his contribution to linguistics and in particular to Celtic linguistics and Celtic studies. Hamp […]
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"State Department: 'Hold down the fort,' other common phrases could be offensive", Fox News 8/31/2012: Watch your mouth — everyday phrases like "hold down the fort" and "rule of thumb" are potentially offensive bombshells. At least according to the State Department. Chief Diversity Officer John Robinson penned a column in the department's latest edition of […]
Helen Sword, "Zombie Nouns", The New York Times 7/23/2012: Take an adjective (implacable) or a verb (calibrate) or even another noun (crony) and add a suffix like ity, tion or ism. You’ve created a new noun: implacability, calibration, cronyism. Sounds impressive, right? Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; […]
There was a cute "Things Kids Write" piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago (James Courter, "Teaching Taco Bell's Canon", 7/9/2012), with the subhead "Today's students don't read. As a result, they have sometimes hilarious notions of how the written language represents what they hear." Is it true that college students today […]
Noam Chomsky in the Guardian uses 'anticipate' to mean 'expect'. I thought language was his thing. — Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) May 1, 2012 Daniel Hannan is both a writer for The Telegraph and also Conservative MEP for South East England; and what he's complaining about is this passage (from "What next for Occupy?", The Guardian […]
Cindy, who works in my favorite barber shop next to the Penn campus, has the following symbols tattooed on her back: I instantly recognized the first and last as two quite well-formed Chinese characters. After two or three seconds of puzzling, I realized that the third symbol is another Chinese character written upside down and […]
In a series of Language Log posts, Geoff Pullum has called attention to the prevalence of polysemy and ambiguity: The people who think clarity involves lack of ambiguity, so we have to strive to eliminate all multiple meanings and should never let a word develop a new sense… they simply don't get it about how […]
Since Westerners first encountered Chinese characters centuries ago, they have been confused over how the characters convey meaning. It was obvious from the beginning that the characters are very different from a simple syllabary in that they do not directly and unmistakably signify the sounds of whole syllables on a one-for-one basis; all the more, […]
My daughter-in-law, Lacey Hammond, is from Willis, Texas, not too far from Houston (46 miles / 74.01 kilometers). Her family on both sides has been living in that area for generations. They are mostly Irish, I believe, but with a bit of German and American Indian (Native American) blood too. Anyway, Lacey calls salad dressing […]
While we wait for the posts of Christmas present to make their appearance, here are the posts of Christmas past: 2010: "Mele Kalikimaka"; 2009: "No, Virginia"; 2008: "Seven fishes"; "Happy Christmas"; 2007: "One Christmas too long"; "Christmas and 'politically correct(ed)ness'", "'Tis the season", "The unkindness of strangers", "Victims and etymology", "Lexical repulsion", "Insert flap 'A' and […]