Language Log

I need to apologize for causing some confusion. My recent posts on journalistic quotation practices ("Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan, and journalistic unquotations", 8/3/2012; "More unquotations from the New Yorker", 8/4/2012) dealt with two issues at once: journalistic carelessness and journalistic deceit. And some readers seem to have concluded that I meant to treat all carelessness […]

Reader GW wrote to ask about a construction in one of Barack Obama's recent speeches: I was looking at the text of a campaign speech by the President today in Pittsburgh, and noted the following paragraph: And then I think about Michelle's mom, and the fact that Michelle's mom and dad, they didn't come from […]

Semantics in the John Edwards trial (James Hill and Beth Lloyd, "John Edwards Defense Relies on Definition of 'The'", Good Morning America 5/13/2012): Not since Bill Clinton challenged the definition of "is" has so much hinged on a very short word. John Edwards appears to basing much of his defense, which begins today in a […]

Michiko Kakutani, "A Master of Verse Spreads Bad Cheer", NYT 4/9/2012: Many American readers know Larkin chiefly from his more darkly funny lines: “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(Which was rather late for me) —/Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first LP” (from “Annus Mirabilis”). Or: They mess you up, “your mum and […]

It has always been our custom on Language Log to adhere to lexicographical verisimilitude in referencing manual excavation equipment.

Yesterday's Tank McNamara:

Last month, in the post "'Words for snow' watch," I reported that Kate Bush's new album (out Nov. 21) is called 50 Words for Snow. I wrote, "It's unclear at this point exactly how Eskimos will figure into Bush's songwriting, but it's safe to say they'll be in there somewhere." Today, thanks to NPR's stream […]

None of the words in the expression "woe is me" are especially rare or obsolete, but the syntactic structure and semantic interpretation are definitely archaic. If you learned the expression by listening rather than by reading, you might well go for some alternative way of composing similar-sounding words to arrive at the contextually apparent meaning, […]

A week after the riots that sprang up across a large part of England, pundits are struggling to find smart and profound things to say. One of the least successful has been David Starkey, a historian and veteran broadcaster. Speaking about the results of immigration into Britain since the sixties, he explained on the BBC 2 […]

Last week, I exchanged a few emails with a journalist about "flash mobs",  a phrase that is now widely used in reference to impromptu gangs of teens who converge suddenly to rob stores or attack passers-by. My correspondent felt that this is a misuse based on a misunderstanding. For her,  what the kids are doing […]

Geoff Pullum, "It's like so unfair", 11/22/2003: Why are the old fogeys and usage whiners of the world so upset about the epistemic-hedging use of like, as in She's, like, so cool? The old fogeys use equivalent devices themselves, all the time. An extremely common one is "if you will". […] Like functions in younger […]

According to the BBC News for US & Canada website today, "The Pentagon is set to announce that the ban on gay people openly serving in [the] US military is to end"; and my colleague Heinz Giegerich did a double-take. He notes with puzzlement that he understood it despite the fact that the adverb is […]

Several readers have sent in links to recent media coverage of C. Nathan DeWall et al., "Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3/21/2011. For example, there's John Tierney, "A Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics", NYT […]