Down in South Carolina, there's a weekly webcast from local bars called Pub Politics (slogan: "Beer … bringing Democrats and Republicans together"). The hosts are Phil Bailey, the Director of the SC Democratic Caucus, and Wesley Donehue, a Republican political consultant. The most recent episode was taped at the Flying Saucer bar in Columbia, and […]
Macy Halford, of The Book Bench at the New Yorker, wrote to me with a question about "begs the question": Recently, one of our posts caused quite a stir by misusing the phrase (to mean “raises the question”), and many discussions ensued, the result of which was that we all realized that even though we […]
Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Yesterday an applicant from China came to my office and introduced herself to me as Runxiao ("Moist Dawn"). However, in previous correspondence, she had always referred to herself as Layn (a variant of Lane; other variants of the name Lane are: Laen, Laene, Lain, Laine, Laney, Lanie, Layn, Layne, and Laynne ("living near a lane"; […]
Mark has already extensively blogged the Google Books Settlement Conference at Berkeley yesterday, where he and I both spoke on the panel on "quality" — which is to say, how well is Google Books doing this and what if anything will hold their feet to the fire? This is almost certainly the Last Library, after […]
Yesterday Rob S wrote to ask about a sentence from the newspaper ("Women's Work and Japan's Hostess Culture", NYT, 8/11/2009): "A recent New York Times article described the Japanese profession of hostessing, which involves entertaining men at establishments where customers pay a lot to flirt and drink with young women (services that do not, as […]
David Alpert ("Excessive passive voice, linguistic detachment observed in Culpeper road fatality", 3/23/2009) complains about Martin Weil's lede in the Washington Post: Four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 were killed early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va., when their car collided with a vehicle that was going the wrong way, Virginia State Police […]
From a recent circuit court opinion on a case with defendants Ike Brown and the Noxubee County [Mississippi] Democratic Executive Committee: … Mable Jamison, an independent notary, testified that Brown phoned her in an effort to dissuade her from collecting absentee ballots from voters that “his people,” such as Windham, intended to collect: “[h]e pretty much said that […]
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A guest post by W. Tecumseh Fitch, on the Occasion of Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday.
As we've recently seen, people love the idea that a culture is revealed by its lexicon. The earliest example of this trope that I can think of is in Michel de Montaigne's 1580 essay "Of Cannibals". This is one of the founding documents of the "noble savage" tradition, and presents the alleged lack of certain […]
Over the years, we've discussed many cross-cultural comparisons based on the "No Word for X" meme. In the most recent LL post on the subject ("No word for integrity?", 12/31/2008), I asserted that [W]hen someone makes a sociological point by saying that language L has no word for concept C, you'll rarely lose by betting […]
According to Michael J. Jordan, "Corruption in Bulgaria tests EU expansion", Christian Science Monitor, 12/31/2008: As the economy worsened here, so, too, did corruption, says John Heck, who runs an EU-funded, anticorruption project in Sofia. The problems are ingrained deeply into modern Bulgarian society, he says, "Integrity – if you look in the Bulgarian dictionary, […]
Virtually zero linguistic content in this story (unless you count the tie between language and other aspects of presentation of self), though it's an ACADEMIC story, and the Language Loggers all have academic associations (we're in the academy or in associated technological fields or participate in the Industry of the Intellect in some other way). […]
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