Helen Sword, "Zombie Nouns", The New York Times 7/23/2012: Take an adjective (implacable) or a verb (calibrate) or even another noun (crony) and add a suffix like ity, tion or ism. You’ve created a new noun: implacability, calibration, cronyism. Sounds impressive, right? Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; […]
In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer has a profile of Bryan Fischer ("BULLY PULPIT: An evangelist talk-show host’s campaign to control the Republican Party", The New Yorker, 6/18/2012), which starts this way: Tupelo, Mississippi, is best known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and his childhood home remains the town’s top […]
Yesterday, I discussed Joan Acocella's strange misreading of two essays introducing the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary ("Rules and 'rules'", 5/11/2012). John Rickford wrote that "the patterns of variation and change … are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions" — but Ms. Acocella took this defense of "vernaculars […]
While we're talking about the politics of language peevers, I can't resist sharing with you the opening of Time Magazine's 1946 review of E.B. White's The Wild Flag: E. B. White plugs federal world government with the dazed urgency of an Esperanto salesman. He has the same high purpose, the same rosy vision, the same […]
A few days ago, Ben Goldacre, or someone pretending to be him on twitter, tweeted dear everyone, when i read your passive sentence constructions i sort of have to convert them into active ones in my head because i'm thick. As Geoff Pullum recently observed I despair when I see this kind of drivel. What […]
Are we losing it? [*] It's been almost three weeks since the latest and greatest episode in the News Corporation phone-hacking scandal began dominating the world's news, and no one at Language Log has yet found a linguistic angle. I mean, Geoff Pullum connected a World Series victory with Strunk & White; I found a […]
The most recent xkcd offers some sound editorial guidance:
Here's how not to place a temporal modifier. See if you readily understand this sentence (from the UK's Daily Mirror) on first reading: [H]e callously instructed his lawyers to add to her family's pain by implying the 13-year-old ran away because she was unhappy at home during days of cross examination. So this poor 13-year-old […]
Permalink Comments off
Yesterday's SAT "question of the day":
Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; […]
Permalink Comments off
Spot the horrible effect introduced here by an over-picky Wall Street Journal subeditor: Quite often, these games don't even turn out to be good: Fewer than half of them have been decided by 10 points or fewer. That "10 points or fewer" phrase on the end is a desperate and quite ridiculous effort at obeying […]
David Craig asked whether Anand Giridharadas is suffering from the Recency Illusion in his small piece on "so" (Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, NYT 5/21/2010), which observes that “So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped […]
A (not particularly amusing) cartoon in the July 5 New Yorker has a doctor giving a bedridden patient some food on a tray and saying: "That which doesn't kill you might give you stomach trouble." The only reason I mention it here is that its oddly stilted wording (why not say "What doesn't kill you"?) […]