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August 10, 2010 @ 1:48 am
· Filed under Language and the media, Silliness, Words words words
Perhaps you saw the outrageous headline from The Daily Telegraph last week: "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered"! Michael Quinion called it "quite the daftest dictionary-related story I've ever read," and I tend to agree. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at […]
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September 19, 2009 @ 6:06 am
· Filed under Announcements
Commenters on this blog and others, and many of my correspondents, have been asking: "Where is Pullum?" I am on a train in England, using unspeakably slow wireless Internet. And I have a copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol cradled in my palms.
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September 18, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
· Filed under Writing
I'm not usually on the Dan Brown desk here at Language Log Plaza — that's Geoff Pullum's domain — but this one came to me (from Bruce Webster). By Tom Chivers on the Telegraph's site: The Lost Symbol, the latest novel by The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, has gone on sale. We pick […]
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May 19, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
· Filed under Language and the movies
WHY did we walk all the way from the New Town to the Edinburgh Odeon without reading the goddamned movie reviews first? Are we so stupid? I guess we must be. It has been years since either Barbara or I was at a film so bad that we felt we had to just get up […]
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June 25, 2024 @ 5:09 pm
· Filed under Lost in translation
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November 29, 2012 @ 9:35 am
· Filed under Etymology
"Governor 'Moonbeam' Takes on His Critics at Greenbuild", The Dirt (American Society of Landscape Architects, 11/26/2012: California Governor Jerry Brown, aka Governor “Moonbeam,” took on his many critics at the 2012 Greenbuild in San Francisco, saying the people who originally called him that are “no longer around, while I still am.” To huge laughs, he […]
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June 28, 2012 @ 6:55 am
· Filed under Language and politics
The Doonesbury site's "Say What?" feature today reports Mitt Romney as having recently said: I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love. I often find I disagree with the views of Republican candidates, and my initial inclination […]
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May 8, 2024 @ 4:02 pm
· Filed under Syntax, Variation
In a comment on "Inerrancy and prescriptivism", Philip Minden wrote that "'just because… doesn't mean' is chalk drawn slowly down the blackboard", referring to the panel on the right. The traditional reference is to fingernails on a chalkboard, not chalk on a blackboard — if chalk on a blackboard produced that irritating visceral response, mid-20th-century school […]
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January 12, 2024 @ 6:41 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Language and the law
The issues discussed in "AI plagiarism" (1/4/2024) are rapidly coming to a boil. But somehow I missed Margaret Atwood's take on the topic, published last summer — "Murdered by my replica", The Atlantic 8/26/2023: Remember The Stepford Wives? Maybe not. In that 1975 horror film, the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut, are having their identities […]
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January 8, 2021 @ 8:04 pm
· Filed under Decipherment, Writing systems
This is a passage from chapter 3 of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress (1998) Eventually one of them [VHM: NSA cryptographers] explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code‑a “cipher text”‑groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers’ job was to study the code and extract from it the original […]
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August 22, 2016 @ 6:30 am
· Filed under Semantics
Sent in by Michael Robinson: I saw this traffic sign in Toledo, Ohio. Luckily I wasn't driving a truck, or I would have had no idea what I was allowed to do. Since we were in a car, we figured U-turns must be OK. Because we were heading to a place that sold coffee, and […]
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May 25, 2016 @ 12:09 am
· Filed under Usage, Variation
Mitch Albom, "Austin pastor’s false cake charge sets real injustice back", Dallas Morning News 5/23/2016: Brown set back every future case of intolerance, allowing critics to ask if it’s real or fabricated. As Albom's column explains, Jordan Brown is the openly gay pastor who accused the bakery at Whole Foods of adding an anti-gay slur […]
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July 19, 2014 @ 7:54 am
· Filed under Writing
Kevin Roose, "Microsoft Just Laid Off Thousands of Employees With a Hilariously Bad Memo", New York Magazine 7/16/2014: Typically, when you're a top executive at a major corporation that is laying off more than 10 percent of your workforce, you say a few things to the newly jobless. Like "sorry." Or "thank you for your […]
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