Language Log

Dipping randomly into another one of Roy Peter Clark's Glamour of Grammar essays ("What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar", 5/8/2008), I found this curious piece of revisionist intellectual history: In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing […]

Most of us haven't thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. The word dominated the news so much back then that the American Dialect Society anointed it Word of the Year. But now the HBO docudrama Recount has brought back memories of chad — taking us back to the […]

William Safire has taken up (in his column in the NYT Magazine of 11 May) the knotty question of whether political candidates should say they approve some message or approve of it. This caught my eye because I've been thinking recently about "diathesis alternations" in general (see here and here), and in particular about alternations […]

According to Dana Milbank, "Still More Lamentations From Jeremiah", Washington Post, 8/29/2008 The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs yesterday: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove […]

I've defended William Safire from David Beaver. I even nominated him for an award, though when the news leaked out, it was biggest public relations disaster in the history of this venerable weblog. But now I'm starting to come around to my colleagues' view. It's time for some serious housecleaning at Safire Industries Ltd. We […]

Whee! I think I'm the first to post using the swanky new system, which has a wisywig interface and everything! First! Nodding to the giant posts of yesteryear, I return to the Language Log classic of finding howlers in that horrid little book. I hadn't looked at the thing since freshman composition, remembering it vaguely […]