Language Log

"Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures", BBC News, 4/18/2010.

Fev at Headsup: The Blog has followed up his post on Britosphere headline culture ("Hed noun pileup of the morning", 2/24/2009), and my comments ("UK death crash fetish?", 3/1/2009), with "Nude pic row vicar resigns", which features great noun strings like "Blast Kelly" (a girl named Kelly involved in an explosion), "George row doc" (a […]

Or is it five nouns, a verb, and two more nouns? "Napa wildfire LNU Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire – August 2020", SFGate 8/18/2020. "Napa" is the county; "wildfire" is obvious; "LNU" turns out to stand for "Lake-Napa-Unit" but the initialism is obviously a thing even if we don't know what it means; "Lightning" is […]

From "Dr. Fegg's Encyclopedia of All World Knowledge", by Terry Jones and Michael Palin: [h/t Don Porges]

Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016: Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses […]

"Pilot Fish Project English Channel crossing bid begins", BBC 8/5/2016. Turns out this is two French guys aiming to cross the channel in a home-made pedal-powered submarine: Two men attempting to cross the English Channel in a pedal-powered submarine have begun their journey. French engineers Antoine Delafargue, 33, and Michael de Lagarde, 36, plan to […]

In an article entitled “A new symbol for epilepsy in Chinese", Mind Hacks asserts: The Chinese character for epilepsy has been changed to avoid the inaccuracies and stigma associated with the previous label which suggested links to madness and, more unusually, animals. The new name, which looks like this 腦癇症 just makes reference to the […]

[I'm following up on this morning's post "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme".] Stanley Fish ("Yes I can", NYT 6/7/2009) cited the "naked I" of the president's recent rhetoric, allegedly representing a change from the pronominal personality that he displayed during the presidential campaign. But I showed this morning that Obama's recent presidential speeches in […]

Ruki Sayid & Ben Glaze, "Boris Johnson returns from Saudi Arabia empty handed after flop oil beg trip",  The Mirror 3/17/2022: Boris Johnson is landing back in Britain empty-handed this morning after his oil begging trip to the Gulf flopped – and Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West. Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine has […]

A headline from today's BBC News: "Knife crime: St John Ambulance to teach teens to help stab victims."

Chris Waigl is a longtime friend of Language Log — among her many accomplishments is the creation of the Eggcorn Database in 2005 (with contributions from Arnold Zwicky and me). These days she conducts post-doctoral research in the Boreal Fires team of the Alaska EPSCoR Fire and Ice project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, […]

Here's a nice crash blossom (that is, a difficult-to-parse ambiguous headline) noted on Twitter by The Economist's Lane Greene, with credit to his colleague James Waddell. In The Financial Times, a promotion of an article inside (a "reefer" in newspaper-speak) is headlined: "Trump demands dog 'Dreamers' deal." Via @james_waddell, a perfect example of headline ambiguity, including […]