In this year's update to the New York Sun's famous 1897 "Yes, Virginia" editorial, "'Marginal' Santa Believer Puts Out Cookies After Trump Chat", AP 12/26/2018: A 7-year-old girl who talked to President Donald Trump on Christmas Eve still left out milk and cookies for Santa despite the president telling her it was "marginal" for a […]
This is a piece that I've been meaning to write for a long time, but never found the opportunity. Now, inspired by the season and about to embark on extended holiday travel, I'm determined not to put it off for yet another year. The genesis of my ruminations on this topic are buried in decades-old […]
Nicholas Fandos, "White House Budget Chief Says Shutdown May Extend Into January", NYT 12/23/2018: Mr. Mulvaney outright rejected Mr. Durbin’s offer. “The president is not going to not accept money for a border wall,” he said.
See, I didn't even quote the whole quip, and you already knew that this post is about Max Weinreich's ubiquitous saying: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy". It may well be the most frequently invoked formula in all of linguistics. Readers of Language Log are certainly no strangers to it, since […]
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is:
From time to time during the past half century or so, I've heard of a food product called seitan. Because the name sounds Japanese and it was associated with a natural food store in Cambridge, Massachusetts that I frequented called Erewhon (see here for the 1872 satirical Utopian novel by Samuel Butler whence it got […]
Josh Marshall, "We need wall", TPM 12/20/2018: For reasons that are not entirely clear to me the word has apparently come down from the White House that the wall, as in the wall to be built along the southern border, must now be called “wall”. In other words, no definite article, no “the”. Here's DHS […]
The First Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP) will be co-located with NAACL 2019. The phrase "natural legal language processing" in the title strikes me as oddly constructed, from a syntactic and semantic point of view, though I'm sure that NAACL attendees will interpret it easily as intended. Let me explain.