Language Log

Yesterday's Dumbing of Age:

Until three days ago when I read the following article in the South China Morning Post, I had never heard of this expression: "Opinion: All you need to know about cheater’s stocks: its lures, its victims and the key opinion leaders" (Shirley Yam, 5/10/17) She calls these stocks LAO QIAN GU in Chinese, but since […]

When, about 40 years ago, I first read the "Basic Annals of Xiang Yu (232-202 BC)" ( Xiàngyǔ běnjì 項羽本紀) in the The Scribe's Records (Shǐjì 史記, ca. 94), the foundation for the 24 official dynastic histories that followed it, I was struck by this sentence:   `Yúshì Xiàng wáng dà hū chí xià, Hàn jūn […]

Today, Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS for short) launches its online version. This is excellent news, coming more than five years after Jonathon Green published the print edition of his exhaustive three-volume reference work. As I wrote in the New York Times Book Review at the time, It's a never-ending challenge to keep up with […]

Ben Mathis-Lilley, "Joe Biden Brings House Down at DNC With Raging Fireball of a Speech Highlighted by Use of Word 'Malarkey'", Slate 7/27/2016. Here's the passage: Your browser does not support the audio element. According to Merriam-Webster's Trend Watch, Malarkey rose to the top of our look-ups on the evening of July 27th, 2016, after Vice-President […]

Earlier this year, Language Log readers contributed to the elucidation of "South Asian wrestling terms" (3/1/16).

"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added 19 Singaporean terms and 13 Hong Kong terms in its latest update."  So reports BBC News in "Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary" (5/12/16) Here are the lists:

Rudraneil Sengupta is preparing a book on the history of wrestling in the subcontinent, and is searching for the etymologies of certain common terms used in the sport. He believes that some of the most common words in wrestling come from Iran & Turkey and that general region, and some are of Sanskrit origin.  For […]

Email yesterday from P.O.: Professor Liberman, we need you. You're no doubt aware of Trump's recent comment, quoting a supporter. But now TPM has gone and printed a reader email linking 'pussy' to pusillanimous'. I had never heard this before, and I'm fairly well-read. I did some google-sleuthing, and found that it has clearly been […]

Fred Pelzman, "The Craziness of ICD-10", MedPage Today 7/2/2015: At our faculty meeting last week, representatives of the medical college and the hospital came to update us on the changes coming into effect with ICD-10. The compliance officers went through the changes in regulations — for inpatients and outpatients — which we've all heard before, […]

When I was a student at Dartmouth (1961-1965), from around mid-December to mid-March, we had roughly three feet of snow on the ground much of the time, but then came the big melt, and we called it the "schlump" season.  The paths across campus were so muddy that the buildings and grounds crew placed "duck […]

On Friday, I gave a talk at the 46th Algonquian Conference. As the conference web page explains, The 46th Algonquian Conference will be held in Uncasville, Connecticut, on the reservation of the Mohegan Tribal Nation.  This is the first time in 46 years that the conference will be held on sovereign Native territory. The 46th […]

This is another one of those posts that I started writing long ago (in this case back in January of 2012), but then set aside for one reason or another.  However, such drafts and research notes usually reemerge on my radar screen sooner or later, especially if they are of compelling interest and potential significance.  […]