Language Log

In an article called "The increasingly lonely hope of Barack Obama," the The New Yorker showed that it belongs to the increasingly lonely class of educated people who still imagine that if they ever allowed an adjunct to separate infinitival to from the plain-form verb of the infinitival complement that it introduces, demons would break […]

Mark Liberman's discussion of an absurd modifier placement rule in the Associated Press Style Book reminded me of an ancient and not particularly funny joke that, the way I first heard it, is based on an offensive stereotype of gay men. I was going to explain on the Chronicle of Higher Education's language blog Lingua […]

Urgent bipartite action alert for The Economist: First, note that my copy of the July 18 issue did not arrive on my doormat as it should have done on Saturday morning, so I did not have my favorite magazine to read over the weekend; please investigate. And second, the guerilla actions of the person on […]

Tim Parks, "Learning to Speak American", NYR: In 1993 I translated all 450 pages of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony without ever using the past participle of the verb “get.” The book was to be published simultaneously by Knopf in New York and Jonathan Cape in London; to save money both editions […]

Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer writes: Is there going to be a language log comment on the article "The English Wars"  in the current issue of the New Yorker?  I find it completely shocking to see that an author who purports to be writing about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism has so little understanding of the subject, and that […]

The Economist's article on the Cumbrian shooting rampage opens with this nicely styled and balanced sentence: "It's like watching something from America," said one resident of Whitehaven, a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast. [The Economist 5 June 2010 p.33] The subject of said has been postposed. This improves intelligibility because the subject […]

Grammar is back in the news in Australia, and not in a good way. According to Justine Ferrari, "Grammar guide an 'education disaster'", The Onion Australian 2/20/2010: ONE of the world's most respected authorities on grammar has written to every school principal in Queensland, warning them of an error-strewn grammar guide distributed by the state's […]

We've noted, more than once, that the grammatical meaning of "passive voice" is pretty much dead in popular usage, while the ordinary-language meaning, struggling to be born, remains inchoate, a sludgy mixture of dessicated grammatical residues and vaguely sexualized associative goo. Sometimes passive voice is used to mean "vague about who's at fault", which seems […]

A couple of days ago, Gail Collins asked ("Just Steele Yourselves", NYT 3/6/2009): So is Steele the de facto leader of the Republican Party? Anybody who announces “I’m the de facto leader” probably isn’t. Then who is? Rush Limbaugh? He sure is enjoying the attention. “The administration is enabling me,” he told Politico. Honestly, “enabling” […]

According to this morning's After Deadline post, that's what Philip B. Corbett at the New York Times calls "rules that aren't", following the lead of Theodore M. Bernstein: Another pet peeve of some After Deadline commenters is the use of “but” or “and” to begin a sentence — as in the third sentence of the […]

One of the things that marks Sarah Palin as a linguistic outsider is her use of also. In part, this is just a matter of frequency. In her contribution to last night's vice-presidential debate, she used the word also 48 times in about 7600 words, accounting for  about 0.63% of her words.  Her opponent, Joe […]

My post on "The split verbs mystery", which was stimulated by a comment from Alan Gunn, in turn stimulated a couple of informative reactions from copy editors.

Is there any "prescriptivist science"? Could there be any? The reaction of some linguists will be that "prescriptivist science" is as much as a contradiction in terms as "creation science" is. But I disagree.