Language Log

What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations?

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log: All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase […]

Since our Christmas-themed posts are a bit thin so far this year, here are a few topical blasts from Language Log's past: 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 throw away"; 2006: […]

Oxford University Press has published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Nothing especially notable in that, except for bibliophiles and usage scholars. But what sets this publication apart is David Crystal's introduction to the volume, an assessment of Fowler's entries.

Decades ago, when I was little, I read this joke in Mad Magazine: Do your feet smell? Does your nose run? You may be built upside-down. I giggled for a short time — just a couple of days, I think — at the surprising coincidence of the two verb senses, and the double pun, and […]

The comments on Geoff Pullum's recent "grammar gravy train" posting have wandered into the confused territory where the grammatical terms pronoun, possessive (or genitive), and determiner live. (The first two have a long history, going back to the grammatical traditions for Latin and Greek. The third is much more recent; OED2 takes it back only to […]

Several readers have recommended Wednesday's Non Sequitur:

Two Cathy strips on this topic that I've been saving up:

Michael Quinion reports in his latest World Wide Words (#661, October 17): TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE TWINK  It's amazing what you can learn from e-mail error messages. The issue last week was blocked by one site in the UK because it had a rude word in the message body. Do you recall reading any rude words? I don't […]

The third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's dictionary The F Word is now out, to much (and much-deserved) acclaim. The book has a scholarly introduction (of 33 pages) on the etymology of fuck; its taboo status; its appearance in print (including in dictionaries) and movies; euphemism and taboo avoidance; and this dictionary and its policies. The many […]

Sarah Currier asked: Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I am […]

From the Times Online of August 23, under the head "Quangos blackball … oops, sorry … veto 'racist' everyday phrases", a story that begins: It could be construed as a black day for the English language — but not if you work in the public sector. Dozens of quangos and taxpayer-funded organisations have ordered a […]

Well, now it is time to tell you the answer. (If you are saying "The answer to what?", you're in the wrong place. Start here, then go to here, and then come back.) Before I do, I should mention that half the readers of Language Log seem to have mailed me with their suggestions or […]