Language Log

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 […]

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, […]