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 […]
As I got out of my taxi at the Helsinki Vantaa airport on my way home, in bright sunshine, I noticed something strange. There were sparkles in the air. Tiny flickering rainbow-sparkling air sequins were all around my head. At first I blinked, thinking my eyes were playing tricks. But it was real. Every cubic […]
In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains: Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs […]
Mark has just supplied new Language Log readers with a reference archive of Language Log posts about languages with lots of words for certain things, and languages with no words for certain things. It is a theme that intrigues ordinary folk; it almost mesmerises them. It is clear that nothing Language Log can do will […]
A couple of days ago, I drove up to Los Angeles from my Language Log Plaza basement office in San Diego, for a quick visit with my grad school classmate Ed Keer. Ed lives in Philly (where Mark Liberman's swank executive suite is located), and was in LA on business. I've visited Ed a few […]
I'm something of a fan of books that correct misinformation — about facts in general, about famous quotations, about medical matters, and so on. Among my latest acquisitions is John Lloyd and John Mitchinson's The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong (2006) (with a foreword by Stephen Fry — yes, THAT […]
The lede of Stephen Colbert's "Smokin' Pole: The Fight for Arctic Riches", 6/10/2008, suggested to Language Log reader Matrixmonkey36 that Mr. Colbert also reads Language Log: Nation, there are seven Eskimo words for melting snow, and all of them also mean "opportunity". [audio] Let's say at least that some Language Log themes are working their […]