A couple of days ago, The Telegraph quoted an actor and a television producer emitting typically brainless "Kids Today" plaints about how modern modes of communication, especially Twitter, are degrading the English language, so that "the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us", and "words are getting shortened". I spent a […]
Lucy Jones, "Ralph Fiennes blames Twitter for 'eroding' language", The Telegraph 10/28/2011: Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival awards in Old Street, London, the actor said that modern language "is being eroded" and blamed "a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter." "Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so […]
Or maybe it's a writing comprehension test. Anyhow, it's past the jump.
The Taboo Desk here at Language Log Plaza is piled high with reports about taboo language and offensive language — about the classification of particular expressions as obscene/profane or otherwise offensive, about the open use of such expressions, about ways people avoid them, and so on. Now, on the front page of the New York […]
Answering a reader's question about somebody vs. someone, Arnold Zwicky speculated yesterday that "you'd find all sorts of interesting variation according to the location / age / sex / class etc. of the speaker, genre, formality of the context, date when the corpora were collected, and so on". In the comments, Jerry Friedman suggested that […]
Jorge Cham at PhD Comics follows up on his analysis of the science news cycle:
In previous postings on word rage, we've noted (mock) threats of punching, slicing, bludgeoning, shooting, hanging, and lightning strikes. Commenting on Ron Charles, "1 Millions Words! But Who's Counting?", Washington Post, 4/29/2009, someone identifying himself as andrewsalomon added judicially-sanctioned electrocution: I don't know anything about the million-word business, but is there any chance of getting […]
My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate […]
We have seen ChatGPT tell stories (and variants of the stories it tells), fancify Coleridge's famous poem on Xanadu, pose a serious challenge to the Great Firewall of China, mimic VHM, write Haiku, and perform all manner of amazing feats. In a forthcoming post, we will witness its efforts to translate Chinese poetry. Today, we […]
[This is a guest post by Martin Woesler in response to this post: "German lexicographic richness" (10/11/21)] Let me share the language feeling of a German with you. As you may have assumed, if a German explains feelings, he does it with a set of rules: German wordcraziness rule # 1: Yes, there is a […]
Illustrating Ben Tarnoff's 11/11/2022 NY Review of Books article "In the Hothouse", Paul Klee's 1922 painting Die Zwitscher-Maschine ("The Twittering Machine"):
In the previous post ("Oil: a partial paradigm" [6/19/22)]), we have been discussing the origins and ramifications of the derivation of the word "oil" from the ancient Greek word for olive. The last comment (before I wrote this post), by Coby, states: "Spanish also has the word óleo, which can mean either oil paint or […]
As a published translator myself, I certainly strive to make my translations worthy of being considered as art. But it isn't always an easy task. Witness "The Tricky Art of Translation and Maria Dahvana Headley’s Modern Beowulf", CD Covington, Tor.com (Mon Feb 7, 2022): It’s not very often that a thousand-year-old poem has a new […]