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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
I'm at the AAAS 2011 meeting in DC, mainly because as chair-elect of Section Z (Linguistics) I'm duty-bound to be here, but also partly because I'm giving a talk in a symposium tomorrow afternoon on "The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer". The session was organized by Victoria Stodden, and this is its […]
I have a piece on "Fresh Air" today on the Was-Jane-Austen-Edited-and-Why-Would-It-Matter-Anyway kerfuffle that Geoff Pullum discussed in a post a couple of weeks ago. After looking over the Austen manuscripts online, I concluded that the whole business was meretricious nonsense. What's most interesting is the extraordinary attention given the claims. It testifies to Austen's Gagaesque […]
Six and a half years ago, in a Language Log post about the spread of texting in Japan, I commented on the lack of enthusiasm for texting in the U.S. ("Texting", 3/8/2004): I don't think that I've even seen anyone texting in the U.S. Now that I think about it, this is a bit surprising, […]
From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, a link to a Nova "The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers" piece on Jean Berko Gleason (shown with an enormous wug), here. Very charming. My grand-daughter (now 6) is a fan of these "Secret Life" pieces (and also some short Discovery Channel programs, especially one on leeches); JBG is one […]
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Reader NG sent email to note an innovative method of taboo-vocabulary avoidance, deployed by Lisa de Moraes or her editors in "'Sons of Anarchy' cast has a few bleepin' words for Emmy voters", Washington Post 8/4/2010. The story to be covered includes a July 8 Facebook entry by Kurt Sutter, "We don't like your kind", […]
Consider this passage from Kate Lahey, "DJs case will be a watershed", The Age, 8/4/2010, sent in by an alert reader: Margaret Thornton, a law professor at the Australian National University specialises in discrimination law and policy. She says the high profile of this {sexual harassment] case would undoubtedly encourage other women to speak out. […]
It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim (among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", […]
[Attention conservation notice: this post wanders a bit too far into the psycholinguistic weeds for some readers, who may prefer to turn directly to our comics pages.] In a recent paper, Ansgar D. Endressa and Marc D. Hauser document a puzzling result: Harvard undergraduates fail to recognize the regularities in "three-word sequences conforming to patterns […]