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The future and the past

Tom Chivers, the Telegraph's assistant comment editor, has posted some comments of his own on the linguistic side of a recent British parliamentary controversy ("Nadine Dorries, linguistic pioneer", The Telegraph 9/12/2011). David Cameron said something about Ms. Dorries that some perceived as offensive; he later apologized to her, and she responded: I don’t for one […]

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Help! I'm trapped in a ???

For the past couple of weeks, I've been getting a bunch of curious email messages that start like these: Thank you for contacting the comics and features department at The Washington Post.  Even though this is an automatic reply to inform you that we have received your comment, we still want you to know that […]

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Wanting your life back

Since BP is "refusing to confirm the widespread reports" that CEO Tony Hayward is just about to be fired, I assume he will be out by the end of the day (if you get up in the morning and find your employer is refusing to confirm reports that you are on the way out, start […]

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Creative work metonymy

Sex and the City 2 premiered in London last night. Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a black strapless dress from the house of her favorite British designer, and what she told her fans provided another interesting example of what Mark Liberman noted in a recent post on fashion talk: There's only one person I could […]

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In the footsteps of Robert Langdon

Language Log readers may recall the link I gave to the Vulture Reading Room discussion of The Lost Symbol on the New York Magazine website, where I made some comments on the extraordinarily heavy use Dan Brown's book makes of redundant (either pointless or already implicit) attributive modifiers. I illustrated from an early passage about […]

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Invented facts from the Vicar of St. Bene't's, part 2

The Reverend Angela Tilby ended her scandalously unresearched little "Thought for the Day" talk of 1 October 2009 (part of which I have already discussed in this recent post) by suggesting that during the British political party conference season (i.e., right about now) we should try taking a blue pencil and editing out all the […]

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The Vulture Reading Room feeds the eternal flame

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away […]

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Word rage wins again

A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?": 'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me – 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. […]

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A Fourth of July Cipher

Near the end of 1801, his first year as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson got a letter from Robert Patterson, professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, containing a page encrypted according to a new method. Patterson described his cryptosystem in detail, and boasted that without the key — which he didn't […]

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Orwell's Liar

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 […]

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"Are": Japanese word of the year

Japanese words of the year are always exciting and surprising, but this year's takes the cake. are あれ pronunciation IPA: [a̠ɾe̞] distal demonstrative, something far off removed from both speaker and listener: that, yon (deictically) that one over there (far from the speaker and the addressee) あれはなんですか? Are wa nan desu ka? What is that? […]

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DeepL Translator

I have often sung the praises of Google Translate (see "Selected readings" below for a few sample posts), but now I've learned about an online translator that, for many languages, may be even better.  Since we've been discussing phenomenal developments in AI quite a bit lately (see also under "Selected readings" below), now seems as […]

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The giraffe, a supposedly composite creature with a complicated nomenclature

The giraffe is such an outlandish animal that many otherwise sensible people have thought that it must be a combination of several species. From the concept of a giraffe being an amalgam of several animals jointly; compare Persian شترگاوپلنگ‎ (šotorgâvpalang, “giraffe”, literally “camel-ox-leopard”) and Ancient Greek καμηλοπάρδαλῐς (kamēlopárdalis, “giraffe”). Noun زَرَافَة • (zarāfa) f (plural زَرَافَات‎ […]

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