Doostang is a job-search platform and advice service that, for a fee, will try to help you get a job. It provides on a blog such helpful things as tips on spicing up your resume. And one of the things it suggests is that you should avoid (are you ready for this, Language Log readers?) […]
Contamination can happen with any surface that touches meat, like a counter top, she says. "There's nothing special about these bags than anything else that can become contaminated," she says. [from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128105740&sc=tw June 25, 2010 ]
A few days ago at the Guardian, David Marsh brought out the stuffed body of George Orwell and propped it up in the pulpit ("Election 2010 – vote for the cliche you hate the most", 4/9/2010): George Orwell, in his brilliant 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: "When one watches some tired [political] […]
The England and Wales Court of Appeals delivered its judgment this morning in Simon Singh's appeal of last year's libel verdict against him. This all began on April 19, 2008, when Singh wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian containing these sentences: The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with […]
I received this email message this morning: Dear Student Systems User There are currently problems with the main database server, affecting NESI, EUCLID, WISARD, STUDMI, etc. IS are investigating, but we have no timescale for a resolution. Sorry for any inconvenience RegardsStudent, Admissions & Curricula Systems You might like to reflect awhile on the linguistic […]
You just can't stop people putting themselves in harm's way. If they're not walking into the buzzsaw they're crashing like bugs into the windshield… As the previously referenced discussion about usage in The Guardian's online pages developed a bit further, a commenter called scherfig responded to Steve Jones's devastating piece of evidence about Mark Twain […]
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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For the better part of the past two years, I've resisted the temptation to run out and buy a Kindle. (Well, OK, I wouldn't have to "run out" to do it, nor could I; as far as I can tell, the Kindle can only be ordered on Amazon. But whatever, it's still an appropriate figure […]
Daniel Gross has a nice article in Slate called “Bubblespeak,” describing the way economists and politicians extend themselves, as Orwell put it, “to make lies sound truthful." Leading the list is “legacy loans,” “legacy securities,” and “legacy costs,” referring to those badly collateralized loans, mortgages, and problems of auto companies that we are hearing so […]
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Politicians who have to assert some proposition P often take advantage of the opportunity to flap their mouths a bit more by asserting not just that P but also that they have consistently maintained that P in the past. It functions as a kind of gratuitous self-affirmation regarding consistency over time, and a pre-emptive defense […]
A police spokesperson from Buffalo speaking about yesterday's plane crash on BBC Radio 4 this morning said that in addition to all the people on the plane (no one survived) there was "one subject in the residence". The baffled Radio 4 presenter had to repeat back a translation into normal English. What on earth is […]
If you've ever found yourself thinking that Language Log writers seem concerned with form rather than function — that they obsess about the details of how things are put, to the exclusion of concern with the core content that really matters, and that they will probably miss the historic excitement of this January 20 grubbing […]