Language Log

From Paul Haine's Twitter account: Lots of good advice here pic.twitter.com/jjB1CEuJ25 — Paul Haine (@paul_haine) August 27, 2018

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "At least we can all agree on the enormity of this usage." See "Begging the question: We have answers", 4/29/2010.

Below is a guest post by Josef Fruehwald: Earlier this week (August 29, 2018, for readers in the future), Ron DeSantis, the Republican candidate for the governor of Florida, said of the victorious candidate of the Democratic Party, Andrew Gillum, that voters shouldn’t “monkey this up” and elect the left leaning Gillum. This has caused […]

In purely linguistic terms, of course. Paul Kane, "‘Kind of an irreplaceable void’: GOP wonders if anyone can seize the McCain mantle", WaPo 8/28/2018: Sen. Lindsey O. Graham tackled a question that many have asked since John McCain’s death Saturday: Who will fill the role of traditional conservative, particularly on national security, that has been […]

I was recently a week late submitting a report to an administrative department of a French university, and experienced a moment of panic when I saw that the response began "J'accuse …" But it turns out that in "J'accuse bonne réception ce jour de votre rapport", the French verb accuser can just mean something like "register" or […]

When I was in high school and college, I read massive amounts of fiction (e.g., Don Quixote, The Magic Mountain), history (e.g., The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), current events (e.g., Time from cover to cover for about twenty years), and so […]

Image on reddit:

A graduate student in classics expresses appreciation for the new norm of academic staff announcing their pronoun preferences, but wonders why everyone gives their preferences as three-element paradigm: she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/their. It's not like anyone is going to mix and match, she/him/their or whatever.

Sign at a hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, spotted by Marc Sarrel:

Jenny Chu spotted this ad from a campaign for Nescafe currently being shown in the Hong Kong MTR:

From Dana Loesch, Relentless, NRATV 8/22/2018: Your browser does not support the audio element. Th- they’re trying to Al Capone the president. I mean, you remember. Capone didn’t go down for murder. Elliot Ness didn’t put him in for murder. He went in for tax fraud. Prosecutors didn’t care how he went down as long […]

Last week ("Joos jokes", 8/14/2018) I linked to the "Proceedings of the Speech Communication Conference at M.I.T.", published in 1950 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  and I promised to revisit "this window into a bygone age" in a later post. So today I present to you the following passage from "Introduction: A […]

This is from an ad for a new apartment building in University City next to Penn: Wèi nín xià gè rénshēng jiēduàn ér zuò de gōngyù 为您下个人生阶段而作的公寓 "Apartments made for the next stage of your (honorific) life" Here's the English version from the same website: Apartments for the next phase in life