In commenting on language hat's link to Victor Mair's post on a "Nontrivial script fail" in Chinese, Vanya wrote: Do we English or French speakers really suffer compared to Spanish or Turkish speakers because our writing system is far more illogical? Recent economic and cultural history might suggest otherwise. Look at all the waste and […]
By now the whole world knows that Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. When I first saw this place name, I thought that it was curious in being composed of a British surname followed by a Hindi-Urdu-Persian ending. We may dispense with the English part of the name through a bit of historical research: […]
The mouse-over title on the latest xkcd points us to a classic argument over etymology vs. usage: I don't know what's more telling–the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had […]
Ben Zimmer, "The Great Language Land Grab", NYT 3/27/2011: When tech companies engage in legal squabbles about who gets to use our everyday words, what are ordinary speakers of the language to make of it all? Microsoft is suing Apple, and Apple is suing Amazon, all over the right to use a simple two-word phrase: […]
WAG is a curious word in British English, confined mainly to journalism, and at first mostly spelled in capital letters (I actually discussed it here once before, here). It's an acronym, not an abbreviation. (Abbreviations are the other kind of initialism: they are pronounced by saying the names of the successive letters, as with IBM; […]
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Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued its (unanimous) decision in FCC v. AT&T. The key issue was whether corporations are entitled to a right of personal privacy. Specifically, the Freedom of Information Act exempts “law enforcement records the disclosure of which 'could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.'” CompTel, a […]
The South China Morning Post (Feb. 13, 2011) carried this peculiar headline for an article by John Carney: "No sex please, our ancestors are resting, sign says." And here is a photograph of the sign in question: The sign is situated in a remote location in Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong. But what in the […]
Paul Kay: The website of a Palo Alto yoga emporium sports the following bit of pricing information: monthly unlimited automatic with drawl ** $125 The doubly starred footnote explains: ** Requires a 6-month commitment. Which seems to mean you can have all the yoga lessons you can stand if you sign up for an automatic withdrawal […]
From Erick Erickson, "A Concern About Reince Priebus", RedState 1/3/2010: Back in January of 2009, I raised the concern that Michael Steele was using Blaise Hazelwood to run his campaign for the RNC. The concern related to the willingness and ability of the Republican consultant class to glum on to their preferred RNC Chairman and […]
Elisabeth Malkin, "Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words", NYT 11/25/2010: The Royal Spanish Academy is lopping two letters off the Spanish alphabet, reducing it to 27. Out go “ch” and “ll,” along with lots of annoying accents and hyphens. The simplified spelling from the academy, a musty Madrid institution that is the chief arbiter […]
There was some grumbling on the American Dialect Society list last week after the New Oxford American Dictionary announced its selection of refudiate as Word of the Year (like Christmas decorations, these days the WOTYs go up before people have even ordered their Thanksgiving turkeys). The choice was a blatant publicity stunt, some said, and […]
In the New Yorker article discussed in an earlier post about leaf-blower noise, Tad Friend wrote that "a Berkeley psychiatrist […] addressed the problem's demographic valence", describing an attempt to rebut the idea that anti-blower activists are "just some fat-ass fussy busses, rich white people in the suburbs, worrying about a little noise". Mark P […]
Reader A.T. writes: When I can't sleep, I go onto TED.com. I'm watching a talk by Pinker and he says syllabuses at one point (about 15:36). Not sure if you've blogged about syllabuses versus syllabi in the Language Log, but I think it'd be a pretty cool topic to discuss.