From Matthew Yglesias: A few of us at work were talking about why it's adviser and protester but professor and and auditor and after bullshitting around for 10 minutes I thought "maybe I should ask a linguist." Have you ever blogged on this? I don't think that we have, though you can find well-informed discussions […]
Jaya Saxena, "Examples of Male Vocal Fry", The Toast 7/22/2015, presents YouTube videos of a bunch of well-known males (human and otherwise) exhibiting so-called vocal fry. There's no textual commentary — but the choice of examples, and the word "male" in the title, underlines the fact that young women are currently being criticized for a phenomenon that can be […]
Thomas Fuller, "Those Who Would Remake Myanmar Find That Words Fail Them", NYT 7/19/2015: It’s the dawn of democracy in Myanmar. If only the Burmese had their own word for it. As this former dictatorship opens to the world, language is a stumbling block. For half a century, Myanmar was so cut off from […]
Ornette Coleman died this morning at the age of 85. Here's the start of his composition Peace, from the 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] The other musicians are Don Cherry (cornet), Charlie Haden (bass), and Billy Higgins (drums). In 1959, one of the local delinquents […]
This is a quiz. It's a short, pop quiz, but the post is going to be very long. 1. In what language is the title of this post written? 2. What does the title mean?
Some clarifications about my Wall Street Journal article, which seems to have led to some misunderstandings among Language Log’s readers (as well as over at Languagehat). Since the readers here are the most well-informed audience that piece will ever reach outside of professional linguists, I thought it’d be useful to clarify what I based the […]
From David Frauenfelder: Here’s an item from the land of language: the "Latinometer". Have you seen it? You enter text into the query box, it analyzes how Latinate your English vocabulary is, and then tells you whether you sound “concrete,” educated, pretentious, or mendacious. The more Latin-derived terms in your text, the more likely you […]
In a ten-year-old LLOG post ("Gender and tags" 5/9/2004), I cited "the complexity of findings about language and gender, where published claims sometimes contradict one another, and where the various things that 'everybody knows' are not always confirmed by experiment", and warned that This happens in every area of rational inquiry, but it's especially common in cases […]
Lauren Collins, "Haiku Herman", New Yorker 3/31/2014: When asked later about the role that poetry had played in Kiev's Independence Square — protesters waved portraits of the nineteenth-century poet Taras Shevchenko — Van Rompuy said, "I wouldn't be surprised if this struggle and this tragedy had not inspired people there." Sometimes, as in that example, […]
Fans of LL's Lost in Translation feature will enjoy the Facebook group Traductions de merde ("Shitty translations"), and a collection of the "Top 40 des traductions de merde" at topito.com. For example, there's an echo of the famous "Translate server error" signs:
Under the heading Freedom 2014, "Whether it’s freedom from surveillance or freedom to be single, this spring the BBC is investigating what freedom means in the modern world". One of the BBC's own contributions to #Freedom2014 is a lovely addition to our No Word For X archive: The Inuit language doesn't have a word for freedom, the closest […]
The American Dialect Society chose because as its Word Of The Year, and thereby provoked an argument, here and elsewhere, about parts of speech. Most dictionaries and grammars see words like for, in, since, etc. as variously prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, or particles, depending on how they're used. Geoff Pullum argues that they're all always prepositions, […]
This is a guest post by Bill Benzon, in response to earlier posts by Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Dan Garrette ("Computational linguistics and literary scholarship", 9/12/2013) and David Bamman ("On Interdisciplinary Collaboration and "Latent Personas"", 9/17/2013).