Language Log

The following photograph appears in this BBC article: "Why is Sanskrit so controversial?" It is accompanied by this caption: "Muslims in India choose to learn Arabic".

John Lawler (thank you!) pointed me to this blog entry by John McIntyre, which was written in response to readers' requests for his reactions to "Weird Al" Yankovic's Word Crimes.  I see that Mark Liberman is already a McIntyre fan (here, here, here, for instance), but I hadn't known about him before. I should — […]

Radley Balko's Washington Post article "The curious grammar of police shootings" begins by reminding us about "mistakes were made" (an utterance so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page), and proceeds to quote a description of a shooting that is not by a policeman ("The suspect produced a semi-automatic handgun and fired numerous times […]

Brett Reynolds wrote: It occurred to me that now that LL is (well) over 10 years old, it would be a nice feature to recycle old but still relevant posts, like BoingBoing does. So, each week you could pick out a couple of great posts from a decade earlier. As an initial experiment, today I'll […]

Several people have written to me about the so-called "Hemingway" app, which offers to give you detailed stylistic advice about your writing.  One useful way to evaluate programs of this kind is to see what they do with good writing — and given this effort's name, it makes sense to check out its opinion about […]

Listen, I need to apologise to thirty or forty of you (I don't really know how many). I'm really sorry. I've wronged you. Mea culpa. You remember all those great examples you sent me of people alleging use of the passive voice and getting it wrong? Well, I have now completed a paper using many […]

Patricia Greenfield, "The Changing Psychology of Culture From 1800 Through 2000", Psychological Science 2013 (pdf): The Google Books Ngram Viewer allows researchers to quantify culture across centuries by searching millions of books. This tool was used to test theory-based predictions about implications of an urbanizing population for the psychology of culture. Adaptation to rural environments […]

This is an illustrative Breakfast Experiment™ for my course at the LSA Institute (on "Corpus-Based Linguistic Research"). It starts from an earlier LL post, "When men were men, and verbs were passive", 8/4/2006, where I observed that Winston Churchill, often cited as a model of forceful eloquence, used the passive voice for 30-50% of his […]

In response to James Forsyth, "The Gove guide to composition", The Spectator 6/30/2013, Tom Chivers notes that "Michael Gove doesn't know what the passive voice is", The Telegraph 7/1/2013. If you read the exchange, you'll see that Tom Chivers is right: Michael Gove advises against use of the "passive voice", citing an example that is […]

Josh Marshall, at TPM where he is editor, quotes President Barack Obama saying of last year's debt-ceiling negotiation shenanigans: "We're not going to play the same game that we saw happen in 2011," and notes an interesting change of sentence plan: You can’t see it in the transcript. But he momentarily caught himself after ‘game’ […]

You know, people keep telling me that I shouldn't blame Strunk & White for the way so many Americans are clueless about identifying passive clauses. Others tell me I'm being prescriptive: I should let people use the word 'passive' however they want. (And you can, of course; you can use it to mean "box containing […]

Let the record show that in the post advertising Passive Voice Day 2012 on Shaun's Blog (April 27), which was naturally crying out to be written entirely in the passive voice, the writer, shaunm, has not made a single slip. Every single transitive verb in his post is in the passive. (There is one intransitive […]

Matt Cherett on Buzzfeed said: "Tonight, my friend Frank sent me a link to the Wikipedia entry for RHOBH star Kim Richards, which he'd just rewritten entirely in the passive voice, making it nearly unreadable and, at the same time, infinitely better." He supplied a screenshot. But the spoof rewriting, supposed to be in the […]