Language Log

Today's SMBC explores an important issue:

There's an interesting and understudied way that typing errors and speaking errors are different. From Gary Dell, "Speaking and Misspeaking", Ch. 7 in Introduction to Cognitive Science: Language, 1995: One of the most striking facts about word slips, such as exchanges, anticipations, perseverations, and noncontextual substitutions, is that they obey a syntactic category rule. When […]

The title of this post combines two topics that are popular with the Language Log audience, and that are not usually discussed together. It is also the title of a LAWnLinguistics post from 2012, shortly after the publication of Reading Law, a book about legal interpretation that was co-authored by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner. […]

Yesterday in Philadelphia we had very strong winds and what the weather people call a "wintry mix", so (along with some big downed trees) there were lots of people holding on to umbrellas turned inside out and partly stripped of their fabric, and lots of wrecked umbrellas discarded along the sidewalks and stuffed into trash […]

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "[They do not move.]"

A few days ago, I posted a post consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a Language Log post (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet by Lynne Murphy, a linguistics professor, quote-tweeting* an earlier tweet by […]

I suspect that this is just as unfair as the old ASR elevator in Scotland skit was, but I don't have time to try it out.  

The tweets above have extra salience for me, because I used begs the question in the traditional way ('assumes the answer to the question in dispute') in my most recent post on LAWnLinguistics. I did so with some trepidation—not because I was worried that someone would think I was using the phrase wrong, but because […]

One of the sensations of the just concluded Olympics in PyeongChang is that South Korea's Olympic women's curling team won the silver medal. From the press conference after the final match, as tweeted by Jonathan Cheng (WSJ Seoul Bureau Chief): Skip Yogurt laments her Korean name 김은정 Kim Eun-jung. That middle character "eun" 銀 is […]

Listen to this 3-second audio clip, and think about what you hear: Your browser does not support the audio element.

Since the announcement by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) yesterday that the President of China would no longer be limited to two five-year terms in office, as had been the case since the days when Chairman Mao ruled, there has been much turmoil and trepidation among China watchers and Chinese citizens.  Essentially, it means that […]

"Florida school shooting: Armed deputy on duty never went inside to confront gunman", Associated Press 2/22/2018: The sheriff said he was "devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean these families lost their children. We lost coaches. I've been to the funerals. I've been to the homes where they sit and shiver. […]

The China Daily, which is owned by the CCP, is China's largest circulation English-language newspaper.  It ran the following article in today's issue: "Chinese increasingly heard around the world", by Yang Zhuang (2/24/18). What with the flood of Chinese tourists, business people, officials, students, and so forth who are travelling to all corners of the […]