I'm grateful to Peter Howard and S. P. O'Grady, who within an hour or so both mailed me a link to this extraordinarily dumb article by James Gingell in The Guardian. As Howard and O'Grady pointed out, Gingell's wildly overstated rant illustrates a point I have made on Language Log many times before: that when language […]
Permalink Comments off
Orwell's Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law. Furthermore I just noticed that its final law is rather curious. We'll get to that shortly. Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases […]
As unneeded further testimony to the lasting damage done by George Orwell's dishonest and stupid essay "Politics and the English language", with its pointless and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all familiar phrases and word usages, Robert Fisk treated his readers in The Independent on August 9 to some ranting about his most […]
IA sent me this article (in Chinese) about a new translation of George Orwell's 1984. It begins: Yīngguó zuòjiā Qiáozhì Ōuwēiěr de míngzhù `1984' chūbǎn yuē 75 nián, jìnrì yíng lái shǒubù Táiwén bǎn. Yìzhě Zhōu Yíngchéng shuō, zhè shì tuīdòng `Táiyǔ zhèngchánghuà'de chángshì, ràng Táiyǔ mǔyǔzhě bùbì tòuguò Zhōngwén yìběn, yě néng jiēchù shìjiè jīngdiǎn […]
It's past time for me to feature Geoff Pullum's new book, The Truth About English Grammar. The publisher's blurb: Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been […]
China Plans to Issue Unified Internet IDs to Netizens Singapore’s primary Chinese language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao recently reported that the Chinese government plans to issue unified internet ID numbers and certificates to members of the Chinese public in order to verify the true identity of users. This raised concerns over control of speech. China’s Ministry […]
Nicholas Tomaino, "The Most Spoken Words in Glasgow", WSJ 1/6/2024: When someone says, ‘Would anyone like a cup of tea,’ he isn’t offering the best-tasting thing one’s ever had. But that isn’t the point. The author begins: I was 23 when I drank my first cup of tea. As an Italian-American, I was raised on […]
Since When Does Eric Adams Speak Spanish, Yiddish and Mandarin? He doesn’t. But New York City is using artificial intelligence to send robocalls featuring the mayor’s voice in many languages. By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays, NYT (Oct. 20, 2023) The calls to New Yorkers have a familiar ring to them. They all […]
The author of this article is Michele A. Berdy, who writes under the byline The Word's Worth. Berdy, born in the US but a resident of Moscow for over 40 years, has been doing this language column for a couple of decades. It is usually light-hearted, even whimsical. Not this one. She departed Moscow after […]
Mary Harris, "Newsflash: Coronavirus Ain’t Going Nowhere", Slate 8/9/2021: I was a little hesitant to speak with Dr. Bernard Ashby. Ashby works in Florida, taking care of COVID patients. He is bearing witness to that state’s record-breaking surge of infections at the moment. It’s not that I didn’t think Ashby would have interesting things to […]
I've been resisting topics like "words for coup" and "the meaning of insurrection" — we'll see how long that resolve lasts — but this morning's distraction is the rebirth of something I wrote about many years ago, namely an online service for identifying instances of passive-voice verbs. In my review of 'The Passivator" (4/6/2004), I […]
In the PRC, you'd best not say anything about COVID-19. It's more or less forbidden for citizens to talk about it, much less question the government's handling of the CRISIS (not a "dangerous opportunity"). Even the name and the very existence of the disease are highly problematic. Still, despite all the draconian censorship, people figure […]