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December 11, 2014 @ 5:37 am
· Filed under Language and culture
Jessie Opoien, "The political pitfalls of cultural crossover: Scott Walker edition", The Capitol Times 12/10/2014: In an undated letter unearthed by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now during the August release of documents from the first of two John Doe investigations related to the governor, Walker responded to a letter from Milwaukee attorney and chairman […]
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September 8, 2014 @ 3:00 pm
· Filed under Language and technology, Writing systems
More than four years ago, on Aug. 23, 2010, Doctor Science left the following comment on a post by Mark Liberman, "Cell phone cupertinos": I'm pretty sure I saw something several years ago about a whole dialect (argot? jargon? slang?) that had developed among young people in Japan (or possibly some other Asian country), based […]
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March 12, 2014 @ 4:53 am
· Filed under Uncategorized
Brett Reynolds wrote: It occurred to me that now that LL is (well) over 10 years old, it would be a nice feature to recycle old but still relevant posts, like BoingBoing does. So, each week you could pick out a couple of great posts from a decade earlier. As an initial experiment, today I'll […]
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September 4, 2012 @ 7:14 am
· Filed under Psychology of language
Matthew Dowd on ABC News This Week for 9/2/2012: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] The truth is a casualty in this. It's as if we're going to make any argument possible that's going to advantageous our side, in order to overcome the other side. The Republicans do it, the Democrats do it.
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August 18, 2012 @ 8:44 am
· Filed under Eggcorns, Language and the law
RIchard Pérez-Peña, "Student Paper Editors Quit at University of Georgia", NYT 8/16/2012: Much of the staff of the University of Georgia’s student newspaper, including the top editors, resigned Wednesday, claiming interference, even censorship, by the nonstudent managers hired to oversee it. Polina Marinova, the editor in chief of the newspaper, The Red and Black, said […]
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April 20, 2012 @ 10:49 am
· Filed under Errors, Language and the media
Making the rounds today, from Andrew Bloch's Twitter feed: Bloch's comment: "Reuters applies foreign exchange rate to 50 Cent. He is now known as RM1.50 in Malaysia."
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November 5, 2010 @ 4:09 pm
· Filed under Errors, Language and politics, Language and the media
Sarah Palin's Twitter feed continues to attract a mind-boggling amount of international media attention, most recently for the act of "favoriting" a tweet from Ann Coulter, which contained a photograph of a church sign with inflammatory things to say about President Obama. Palin, or whoever runs her Twitter account, subsequently "unfavorited" the tweet, and Palin […]
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August 1, 2010 @ 11:23 am
· Filed under Eggcorns
Another problem of attributional abduction, this one from Josh Marshall, "So How'd it go?", TPM 7/31/2010: Our reporting duo gives us the round down of just what happened at today's pro-diversity 'Uni-Tea' Tea Party rally in Philadelphia.
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August 1, 2010 @ 9:28 am
· Filed under Psychology of language
Frank Rich, "Kiss This War Goodbye", NYT 7/31/2010, writing about the Pentagon Papers: Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. [emphasis added] […]
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July 9, 2010 @ 7:44 am
· Filed under ambiguity, Silliness
When we last posted about Tyson Gay, he'd been entertainingly cupertinoed. And now, from Reuters on July 3, this: Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters
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June 28, 2010 @ 11:41 pm
· Filed under Errors, Language and the media
The latest installment of WNYC's show Radiolab is entitled "Oops," and it's about how we so often get tripped up by the unintended consequences of our actions. Hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad brought me in to the studio to share some classic word-processing Oops-es. I talk about various search-and-replace howlers, including the spellchecker-aided miscorrections […]
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April 18, 2010 @ 2:06 pm
· Filed under Errors, Orthography
The Australian branch of Penguin Books is in a certain amount of trouble for publishing a cookbook containing a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto that includes "salt and freshly ground black people".
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April 11, 2010 @ 9:31 am
· Filed under Humor, Language and technology, Lost in translation
Six of us — three philosophers, two linguists, and a mathematician — were having dinner the Café Noir in Providence last Thursday night, and when three of us decided on the excellent boeuf bourguignon, someone at the table told a story of a colleague who tried to include the phrase boeuf bourguignon in a word-processed […]
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