Peter Baker, "How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan", New York Times, 12/5/2009: The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone […]
The Taboo Desk here at Language Log Plaza is piled high with reports about taboo language and offensive language — about the classification of particular expressions as obscene/profane or otherwise offensive, about the open use of such expressions, about ways people avoid them, and so on. Now, on the front page of the New York […]
Yesterday, I quoted someone writing on the nanowrimo forum ("Also, check the back seat", 11/7/2009), who offered an apparently irrefutable argument in favor of "No Initial Coordinators" (NIC), the zombie rule that forbids us to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and or but: [Usage standards and grammar] are related but not identical. […]
From the Times Online of August 23, under the head "Quangos blackball … oops, sorry … veto 'racist' everyday phrases", a story that begins: It could be construed as a black day for the English language — but not if you work in the public sector. Dozens of quangos and taxpayer-funded organisations have ordered a […]
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Fifty years ago, my job was to conduct field interviews of older residents in the rural part of the state of Illinois as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. The Atlas was trying to document the words, expressions, and pronunciation patterns of older residents who had lived in the same […]
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Almost three years ago, a Language Log sequence about an obscure point of typographical history got featured on fark.com. And as I explained in "The Gray Lady goes up against fark.com", 6/20/2006, the result was about 10,000 extra LL readers on June 14, 2006: (The spike on 6/20/2006 was due to a piece in the […]
Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage: The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it […]
Geoff Pullum argues that the bleeping of Rod Blagojevich shields him from a full public appreciation of his foul-mouthedness: "somehow you don't get the measure of Rod Blagofuckinjevich's coarseness and contempt for the public by merely learning that he regarded his gubernatorial privilege as valuable; 'a fuckin' valuable thing' gets across more of the flavor […]
As preface to today's taboo-language story, an Ariel Molvig cartoon from the latest New Yorker: The story is a column by Adam Liptak in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times: "Must It Always Be About Sex?", about the word fuck, which the Times is committed to avoiding — so that if […]
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There's a long tradition of popular peeving about dictionaries and what they have entries for: non-standard items, slang, taboo words, slurs, and so on. The complaint is that by listing these items the dictionaries are recognizing them as acceptable in the language, are "condoning" them (even when the items have appropriate usage labels attached to […]
A column in the Sunday New York Times from the newspaper's public editor Clark Hoyt is essential reading for anyone concerned with modern journalistic practices of taboo avoidance. Running under the headline "When to Quote Those Potty Mouths," the piece takes its cue from the Rev. Jesse Jackson's notorious comments about Sen. Barack Obama, recently […]
Zippy explores the rustic dang and durn (roughly equivalent to damn and its substitute darn), wielding them in a variety of syntactic contexts:
When it comes to taboo mystification, sometimes the New York Times is just too damn coy. Last November, the name of the punk band "Fucked Up" ended up rendered in a Times concert review as a string of eight asterisks, with some oblique talk about how the name wasn't fit to print in the Times, […]