In my capacity as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, I recently had the opportunity to interview David Crystal about his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a careful demolition of the myths surrounding text messaging. You can read the first part of my interview on the Visual Thesaurus website here, with parts two and […]
Lucy Mangan ("Every little helps", The Guardian, 9/13/2008), is the troubled child of a mixed marriage: As a family, we have few abstract points of contention. Generally, we like to keep arguments specific and concrete – who ate the last peppermint cream, who lost the door keys, who killed Grandma, that kind of thing. But […]
This is a brief follow-up to what Mark just said to "Robert", one of our commenters who thinks there is "massive literary authority" for the avoidance of split infinitives. Robert is going to be really disappointed by this. The eminent (and fairly conservative) early 20th-century American grammarian George O. Curme made a detailed study of […]
This morning, "Robert" added a comment to a Language Log post from April 30, "Books more loved than looked in". He began: Just found your website, after hearing one of you discuss it on BBC Radio 4. I'm very glad to have discovered it, because it looks like good fun. I tend to avoid split […]
Those of us who have been avoiding the use of transitive verbs because we thought they were argumentative or prejudicial can now rest easy. According to Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley, they are not. He rendered his decision earlier this week, saying, “There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs.” This settles that […]
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Geoff Pullum's most recent posting on split infinitives noted that handbooks on grammar and usage do not prohibit them, but most say they should be avoided, unless splitting the infinitive would improve clarity. When you think about it, this is decidedly odd advice. There's some history here, which is well covered in MWDEU, and has […]
From the annals of incorrection: cases where, because of some structural similarity between constructions C1 and C2, some people see C1 (incorrectly) as an instance of C2, where C2 is believed (incorrectly) to be non-standard (or defective in some other way), so that these people avoid C2 and replace it by something else. The proscription […]
Geoff Pullum's wonderful example of the perils of trying to avoid split infinitives: it can lead to a straightforwardedly ungrammatical result. Simplifying the original to make the point clearer, the entirely unproblematic (1) Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to dramatically increase learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates was incorrected to the entirely problematic (2) Rockefeller has pledged $100 […]
I mentioned recently here on Language Log that the people who live in terror of splitting infinitives appear never to have looked inside the handbooks that they claim to be respecting. I came upon a remarkable instance of this the other day while looking for something else. Punctuality Rules! is advertised as "A blog devoted […]
The recent gift of a staggering $100,000,000 by a single person to Harvard University — the largest gift from an alumnus in Harvard's history — has just been announced, in prose that suggests no matter how much money they may raise, the development and public relations staff at Harvard are afflicted by ancient irrational terrors: […]
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A couple of days ago, Andrew Mueller at the Guardian tossed some bleeding gobbets into the crowd of ravening peevologists ("Linguistic pedants of the world unite", 4/14/2008). His point of departure: For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew […]
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From Doonesbury 5/2/2021: Linguists have paid a lot of attention over the years to wanna-contraction, starting with George Lakoff's 1970 paper "Global rules" — see these lecture notes for a discussion, if you're interested. But gotta-contraction has gotten a lot less attention — 7 Google scholar hits vs. 658. The reason for this difference is simple: […]