As of the time of writing, you only get one hit if you ask Google to show you all the pages on the web containing the word sequence in order legally to minimise. That lone hit leads you to an anonymous leader in The Times (there is a paywall) in which this sentence occurs: Companies […]
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"Inaugural Embedding", 9/9/2005: 0 1 2 3 4 Mean Sentence Length Washington1789 629 (44%) 554 (39%) 206 (14%) 36 (3%) 5 (<1%) 60 Lincoln1865 440 (63%) 222 (32%) 38 (5%) 0 0 26 Bush2005 1842 (88%) 244 (12%) 4 (<1%) 0 0 22 Trump2017 1264 (87%) 178 (12%) 15 (1%) 0 0 15 "The evolution […]
Dave Cragin writes: I have a brother-in-law who is originally from Hong Kong and his last name is Yuen. I learned from John McWhorter’s superb series on linguistics that this Chinese name is of Turkic origin. I asked my brother-in-law about this and he said “Yes, family lore is that we originally came from North-West […]
A question asked on Facebook: Okay, linguists who work on focus sensitive particles – can you tell me what on earth this means? "From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first" I couldn't bear to listen so I don't know where the focal accent was, but no possibility makes sense. 'only AMERICA […]
It's probably not an accident that yesterday's inaugural address, compared to the previous half-century or so, has the highest frequency of the morpheme america (= America, American, Americans) and the lowest frequency of the morpheme freedom (= freedom, freedoms):
Before Donald Trump's speech yesterday, I wondered whether he would turn the political world upside down by delivering a high-energy improvised riff in the style of his campaign rallies. But no — his speech was scripted and read verbatim as written, although it did feature several of the signature lines from his rallies, as well as the first […]
I am at UC Davis to participate in a Global Tea Initiative. The first event yesterday morning was to go to a tea tasting presided over by Master Wing-Chi Ip. A taxi came to our hotel to drive us over to a building bearing the name of Robert Mondavi (1913-2008), a giant in the California […]
Callum Borchers, "Count Obama’s references to ‘I’ and ‘me’ while you can, conservative media", WaPo 1/18/2017: For eight years, tracking Obama's use of the personal pronouns "I" and "me" has been a cherished ritual in the conservative media — one small way to promote the idea that the president is self-centered and therefore out of […]
Big news! "Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls" (The Verge, 1/17/17)
The linguistic highlight of Steven Mnuchin's confirmation hearing: Your browser does not support the audio element.
Matt Apuzzo, "Under Trump, Approach to Civil Rights Law Is Likely to Change Definitively", NYT 1/19/2017: At this confirmation hearing, Mr. Sessions harkened to the era of segregation in arguing that there was no need for the federal government to become involved in prosecuting crimes against women or gay people that were already being prosecuted […]
Graham Taylor has died at the age of 72, after a long and varied career as a manager and coach of English football teams. But this is Language Log, not English Football Log, and so we'll leave the obsequies to others and focus on Mr. Taylor's best known quotation, "Do I not like that": Your […]