Language Log

A furious Daniel Schwammenthal at The Commentator excoriates The Economist for accusing the Israeli government of being delusional and paranoid. Asking rhetorically why there continues to be conflict between Israel and the Palestinians according to The Economist’s view, Schwammenthal adds a linguistic element to his political critique: "Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace […]

You're the prime minister of Australia. (Well, you're not, actually, but this is my little rhetorical way of plunging you imaginatively in medias res. I want you to imagine that you're the prime minister of Australia.) Your foreign minister is a former prime minister that you ousted from the leadership in 2010, and now a […]

Before reading further, consider the following newspaper headline, and make a mental note of what you think the article is about:

After so many posts by Geoff Pullum (ok, rants, but I agree with him!) about journalists who use the word "passive" without knowing what it means, it actually caught my eye just now to see "passive" used perfectly correctly! Has it come to this? Should I say "Congratulations to Nate Silver!"? Here it is: First, […]

Many have begged me to give up on my campaign to get journalists to stop using the term "passive" in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means. Some warn me that the quest is hopeless and no one will ever listen; some say I have failed to see that some sort […]

Back in September of 2008, a Seattle-based start-up named SpinSpotter offered a tool that promised to detect "spin" or "bias" in news stories. The press release about the "Spinoculars" browser toolbar was persuasive enough to generate credulous and positive stories at the New York Times and at Business Week. But ironically, these very stories immediately set […]

People keep going on about the passive voice and revealing that they don't really know much about what it is. I have commented on this so often that some readers have written to beg me to stop. To the sensitive souls who just couldn't bear to be told one more time about a case of […]

AN EXTRAORDINARY SERIES of news revelations about "hacking" scandal in the Murdoch-owned tabloid press continues to amaze the UK public. There are bombshells exploding here in Britain every eight hours or so: an ex-editor and former government aide arrested; a whole newspaper permanently closed down on 48 hours' notice; news that CEO Rebekah Brooks' resignation […]

A web page about songs referring to God, pointed out to me by James Kabala, makes a critical remark about the grammar or style of one of the song titles: 11. New Order – 'Touched by the Hand of God' Though it's guilty of one of the most heinous journalistic crimes – that of 'passive […]

Ardian Vehbiu wrote to draw my attention to a passage in Matthew Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine: Philistinism! — we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. Ardian wrote "I found this quote counter-intuitive and funny. (I like the idea of the […]

"The BBC is a remarkable place", says Nigel Paine, the Head of People Development at the BBC, in his prefatory note to The BBC News Styleguide (2003); "Much of the accumulated knowledge and expertise locked in people’s heads stays that way: occasionally we share, and the result is a bit of a revelation." Paine is […]

About a year ago I wrote a post entitled "Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance." This construction is still flourishing in China.  Indeed, it is so ubiquitous nowadays as to have lost some of its edge.  While not entirely banal, the frequent usage of the adversative passive has caused much of […]

On September 30, 2010, a journalistic genre passed away: the mock obituary marking the purported demise of a linguistic phenomenon. According to the coroner's report, the cause of death was rampant overuse.