Search Results
March 17, 2023 @ 5:37 am
· Filed under Animal behavior, Animal communication, Language and animals
Almost as many as Eskimo words for "snow". (hee-hee haw-haw) (see below for a sampling) I've always been a great admirer of donkeys, and I love to hear them bray and make all sorts of other expressive sounds, some of which I am incapable of adequately expressing in words — especially when they are being […]
Permalink
March 30, 2019 @ 9:07 am
· Filed under Snowclones, Sociolinguistics
Robert Booth, "'Ching, wap, ox': slang interpreters decipher texts for court evidence", The Guardian 3/29/2019: Do you know your “tum-tum” from your “ching” and your “corn” from your “gwop” (gun, knife, ammunition and money)? Neither do police and prosecutors, who have begun consulting a linguistics professor to help decipher urban slang and drill lyrics used […]
Permalink
June 11, 2016 @ 2:45 am
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and culture, Language contact, Language exotification, Linguistic history, Lost in translation
Lila Gleitman points out to me that in one of the slowly increasing number of articles passing round the pseudoscientific story about Yiddish originating in four villages in Turkey you can see that hallmark of non-serious language research, the X-people-have-Y-words-for-Z trope: Putting together evidence from linguistic, history, and genetics, we concluded that the ancient Ashkenazic […]
Permalink
August 12, 2015 @ 8:32 am
· Filed under Language and culture
Helen DeWitt's wonderful novel The Last Samurai has unfortunately gone out of print, so I was happy to learn from her yesterday that a new edition is planned. What follows is an epistolary post, consisting of her note to me, her letter to Kenn Harper, and his response to her.
Permalink
October 8, 2014 @ 8:13 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones
From the current New Yorker: allrecipes.com has "more than 50" grits recipes (I count 64 on display), and there are lots more on other sites, so (costume aside) this is entirely region-appropriate. It's still linguistically naive, since the recipes have mostly-transparent phrasal names like "Raspberry Kielbasa over Cheese Grits"; but hey, it's a cartoon, and […]
Permalink
January 30, 2013 @ 4:43 pm
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and culture, Language exotification, Words words words
I recently wrote on Lingua Franca about my astonishment over Piotr Cichocki and Marcin Kilarski. In their paper "On 'Eskimo Words for Snow': The Life Cycle of a Linguistic Misconception" (Historiographia Linguistica 37, 2010, Pages 341-377), they mistook my 1989 humorous opinion column "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" for a research paper, and bitterly attacked […]
Permalink
March 14, 2012 @ 8:56 pm
· Filed under Semantics
From Larry Horn, an example of triple negation found in Chad Harbach's 2011 novel, The Art of Fielding. As discussed in "Newt's not not engaging", 12/11/2011, Larry has previously argued that in some cases "double negatives may fail to completely cancel out, instead amounting to a weaker positive than their target would have provided". In […]
Permalink
March 22, 2011 @ 9:06 am
· Filed under Humor
"Eskimo’s kennen nog maar drie woorden voor sneeuw", De Speld, 3/21/2011 ("Eskimos now have only three words for snow") — subtitle "Klimaatverandering debet aan taalverarming" ("Climate change to blame for language impoverishment"): Een uitgebreid taalonderzoek onder 1.000 Inuit heeft uitgewezen dat het aantal woorden dat hun taal kent voor sneeuw is gereduceerd tot drie. In […]
Permalink
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 […]
Permalink
April 2, 2010 @ 11:34 pm
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and advertising, Snowclones
This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the "marketing innovations agency" Ignited: Integrated Copywriter/Etymologist Sure, the Eskimos have 40 words for “snow,” but Ignited has 40 words for “next.” That’s because we’re kind of obsessed with what’s next, whether that be in technology or media or Eskimo etymology. If […]
Permalink
September 24, 2009 @ 8:13 am
· Filed under Language and culture
Kevin Drum recently laid out a long-standing unsolved problem, one that has preoccupied such luminaries as Paul Krugman, James Fallows, and Glenn Beck ("Saving the Frogs", Mother Jones, 9/23/2009). The problem is that there's no good substitute for the over-used and untrue story about how a frog, if placed in a pot of gradually heated […]
Permalink
July 30, 2009 @ 8:34 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the news
It's a trend: comix-ironic Whorfianism. Several readers have drawn my attention to the latest Diesel Sweeties:
Permalink
February 22, 2009 @ 2:22 pm
· Filed under Language and culture
Yesterday afternoon, Mark Halpern sent me a response to last week's discussion of his book Language and Human Nature in the post "Progess and its enemies", 2/16/2009. It's presented below as a guest post, after the usual transformation from MS Word to html. (I take responsibility for any format or font errors that may have […]
Permalink