Language Log

The BBC is doing a day or two of filming on the roof terrace of the building that houses my department, and the parking lot below our windows is thick with dressing room trailers and wardrobe trailers and generator trucks. Plus there is one other vehicle: parked directly below the windows of the room where […]

Prescriptive rules are often the result of someone's idiosyncratic attempt to apply logic to a half-understood question of linguistic analysis. In promoting his new book Strictly English, Simon Heffer recently provided us with two examples ("English grammar: Not for debate",  9/11/2010, and "Mr. Heffer huffs again", 9/12/2010). Such exercises are sometimes motivated by a genuine […]

Geoff Pullum was rightly baffled by Simon Heffer's recent pronouncement that sentences like The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary are ungrammatical, since the verb warn, Heffer imagines, must always be transitive. But the objection doesn't come completely out of nowhere. As commenter iching noted, there's an entry on warn in Merriam-Webster's […]

Various Language Log readers have been sending me to this BBC report about a British columnist called Simon Heffer, who has a book about the decline of proper language use coming out, and in order to promote it recently visited a school and talked to the children about his prescriptive notions. The BBC used this […]

Over on ADS-L, Larry Horn read his NYT carefully: One additional highlight of the Virginia Heffernan guido/guidette piece in today's N. Y. Times Magazine section is a nice example of a plural pronoun with singular sex-known but indefinite antecedent, a phenomenon we've discussed in the past. Here's Sammi Sweetheart, describing the role she plays in the MTV Reality show, "Jersey Shore", as quoted […]

As the Wikipedia article for the British newspaper The Guardian explains, The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page […]

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). […]

We're been writing about taboo avoidance here on Language Log for years. It's an arena in which Faithfulness (reproducing an original faithfully) conflicts with a type of Well-Formedness (cleaving to some rule about what is "right", "correct", "appropriate", etc.). I've posted many times about such conflicts on Language Log (a list, probably incomplete, of my […]