Language Log

…and between intertextuality and self-indulgence.

Richard T. Oehrle died on Wednesday. He was one of my oldest friends — I met him in 1965, when I was a first-year undergraduate and neither of us had any idea that we would end up in related fields.  (Dick's undergraduate and master's degrees were in English and Comparative Literature, before he started grad […]

              H/t (via retweet) Hugo Mercier. UPDATE:

From the Twitter account of @zhaoxunlinghun: 喝酒前是寶島！喝翻了以後是臺灣╮(╯_╰)╭ pic.twitter.com/JDU2rD25i8 — 找尋失去的靈魂 (@zhaoxunlinghun) February 23, 2018

If you've seen my previous post, SCOTUS cites CGEL (etc.), you may have been surprised to see an unfamiliar name in the byline beneath the title—unfamiliar because you've never heard or me, or because you didn't associate me with Language Log other than as an occasional commenter and a long-time-ago guest poster. Either way, you're […]

Henry Cooke (aka "prehensile" on GitHub) has hatched a fascinating techno-artistic experiment. He set up two Amazon Echos to talk back and forth, each repeating a text to the other, with every iteration introducing new errors. His initial inspiration was "I Am Sitting in a Room," a 1969 work of acoustic art by Alvin Lucier, […]

(Cross-posted from LAWnLinguistics.) When grammatical questions come up in legal cases, the lawyers and judges will want to support their arguments and analyses with citations to books about grammar. Most of the time, they cite books intended for a general audience, such as the McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, The Elements of Grammar, […]

Barton Beebe & Jeanne Fromer, "Are We Running Out of Trademarks? An Empirical Study of Trademark Depletion and Congestion", Harvard Law Review, February 2018: Abstract: American trademark law has long operated on the assumption that there exists an inexhaustible supply of unclaimed trademarks that are at least as competitively effective as those already claimed.  This […]

Lisa in Toronto found these posters in Taipei at Cafe Macho in November. They say #newyearnewnation in one corner.

A student called my attention to this cloying glorification of PRC President Xi Jinping:

Today's Dumbing of Age illustrates, in contemporary Indiana, a point that George Bernard Shaw made about England in 1916: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Mouseover title: "super honestly, she just wants to punch everyone in the face"

Tomorrow there will be a memorial service for Aravind Joshi, who died on the last day of 2017 ("R.I.P. Aravind Joshi", 1/1/2018).  Martha Palmer, who is flying in from Colorado for the event, sent me this remembrance: Aravind was such a constant, guiding presence in my life, from 1980-2017.  Always so kind and gentle, and so […]