Language Log

Sign in Guilin, China:

Ruth Blatt, "The Lean And Mean Led Zeppelin Organization", Forbes 9/6/2014: The Zeppelin organization was small by today’s standards, with a crew of only about 15 people traveling with the band. The band itself would arrive 30 minutes before a show. “They would turn up and they would go in the dressing room. There was no […]

Nick Wingfield, "Microsoft Pins Xbox One Hopes on Titanfall, a Sci-Fi Shooting Game", NYT 3/9/2014: “It’s hard to understate how incredibly important Titanfall is for Xbox,” Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing and strategy officer for devices and studios at Microsoft, said in an interview. If it's not clear to you why this is semantically and psycholinguistically […]

I've occasionally complained that when it comes to comparing sampled distributions, modern western intellectuals are mostly just as clueless as the members of the Pirahã  tribe in the Amazon are said to be with respect to counting (see e.g.  "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007).  And it doesn't take high-falutin concepts like "variance" or "effect size" to engage […]

In a 2010 NYT “On Language” column, Grant Barrett traced the claim that “cellar door” is the most beautiful phrase in English back as far as 1905 1903. I posted on the phrase a few years ago ("The Romantic Side of Familiar Words"), suggesting that there was a reason why linguistic folklore fixed  on that […]

MedPage Today is an excellent source for medical news — but recently their email service has started juxtaposing headline-fragments in a way that takes me aback:

Lane asked "It would be great if someone had time to find some truly Obama signature phrases, doing the math properly. I'd be curious to know what words he actually does use unusually often." I have two classes to prepare for today, and a student study break to get ready for (bread and cheese, fruits […]

I'm in Minneapolis for the LSA 2014 annual meeting, about which more later. For this morning, all I have time for is a note about the curious cover of the Mpls St Paul magazine that the hotel put out for me:

Back in 2008, an image got passed around the blogosphere showing the Singaporean identity card of one Batman bin Suparman. I broke down the name in a Language Log post (my first after the great LL changeover). Since then, I hadn't thought much of young Batman, but today brought the sad news that he had […]

I have a piece on Fresh Air today, behind the curve as usual, on the discussion that followed the Oxford Dictionary Online's inclusion of twerk, which Ben Zimmer covered in a post a couple of weeks ago ("Getting worked up over 'twerk'"). Actually I don't care much about twerk, whose coolness and credentials Ben defended definitively. […]

As we have frequently noted here on Language Log, science stories on the BBC News website are (how to put this politely?) not always of prize-winning standard with respect to originality, timeliness, reliability, or attention to the relevant literature. In fact some of them show signs of being written by kids in junior high school. […]

Anthony Gardner, "Absurd Persons Plural", The Economist 12/12/2012: Earlier this month I went to a lecture by the American novelist Richard Ford. Called "Why novels are smart", it was brilliant and thought-provoking. But my thoughts were also provoked by the British academic who introduced him, commending—among other things—his "prose styles". Now, Richard Ford is without […]

Local Dallas newscaster said "where we're at" twice just now. Would a national newscaster get away with this? I consider it uneducated. — Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) August 11, 2012 The entry for where . . . at in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes that The use of at following where was first […]