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September 26, 2008 @ 3:44 pm
· Filed under Language and the media, Variation
Philip Gourevitch's "The State of Sarah Palin" (New Yorker, 22 September, p. 66-7) quotes from an interview with the vice-presidential candidate: "We're not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly–Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips–and beg them to do this [build a natural gas pipeline] for Alaska," Palin told me last month in Juneau. […]
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September 3, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
· Filed under Language and politics
What with all the controversy over Sarah Palin's views and (lack of) qualifications to be President, as far as I can tell thus far no one has claimed that she is prone to linguistic errors. That's really too bad. If only she would make the right sort of error, rather than the mundane bushisms we […]
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July 17, 2023 @ 10:51 am
· Filed under Animal communication, Dialects, Language and animals, Language and biology, Topolects
Who would have thought? Even North America’s Elk Have Regional Dialects Why do Pennsylvania elk sound different from Colorado elk? By Kylie Mohr, The Atlantic Monthly (July 16, 2023) —– It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound […]
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May 31, 2022 @ 9:18 am
· Filed under Etymology, Language and food
What with the high heat (in the 90s) these days, at least here in Philadelphia, and all the talk of Semitic roots, especially those beginning with one or the other of the five Proto-Semitic sibilants, I feel an impulse to write about "sherbet". Already from the time I was a little boy, I sensed that […]
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December 6, 2021 @ 11:35 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics
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May 9, 2021 @ 8:47 am
· Filed under Morphology, Prosody
From Doonesbury 5/2/2021: Linguists have paid a lot of attention over the years to wanna-contraction, starting with George Lakoff's 1970 paper "Global rules" — see these lecture notes for a discussion, if you're interested. But gotta-contraction has gotten a lot less attention — 7 Google scholar hits vs. 658. The reason for this difference is simple: […]
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March 1, 2017 @ 7:20 am
· Filed under Crash blossoms, Headlinese
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July 19, 2015 @ 9:39 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Language and politics
Nice fucking try, Twitter: pic.twitter.com/ityPbk4hLy — Jim Henley (@UOJim) July 18, 2015
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June 7, 2014 @ 8:47 am
· Filed under Language and culture, Phonetics and phonology, Psychology of language
. . . but not being yourself just might. There's been a lot of media interest recently in a new study of "vocal fry", sparked in part by an unusually detailed magazine article — Olga Khazan, "Vocal Fry May Hurt Women's Job Prospects", The Atlantic 5/29/2014. Other coverage: Gail Sullivan, "Study: Women with creaky voices — also […]
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February 14, 2014 @ 7:52 am
· Filed under Words words words
Today's Doonesbury: This is actually a re-run of a strip from 1/8/2013, and not everyone got it then: Apologies for the non-sequitur, but in today’s Doonesbury strip a character uses the phrase “to rock the snark”. Does anyone know what this phrase means? Nobody answered the question on that 2013 comment thread, but we're here […]
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June 6, 2013 @ 12:23 pm
· Filed under Language and the media
"Red-blue divisions start with newborns’ names; parents show partisan tendencies", Washington Times 6/5/2013: Names with the soft consonant “l” or that end in a long “a” — for example, President Obama’s daughter Malia — are more likely to be found in Democratic neighborhoods, while names with hard vowel sounds such as K, G or B […]
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December 8, 2012 @ 8:58 pm
· Filed under Language and the media
… at least judging by the readers' comments on Stephanie Banchero, "Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test", Wall Street Journal 12/6/2012. Banchero's article seriously misunderstands and misrepresents an already-misleading account of American schoolchildrens' knowledge of vocabulary — see "Journalist Falls Flat in Comprehension Test", 12/8/2012, for details. But the 127 readers' comments suggest that the paper […]
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September 19, 2012 @ 6:26 am
· Filed under Language and the media
Sometimes the New York Times stylebook makes life hard for its writers, and interesting for those of its readers who like cloze tests. According to Michael Barbaro, "A Mood of Gloom Afflicts the Romney Campaign", NYT 9/18/2012: A palpably gloomy and openly frustrated mood has begun to creep into Mr. Romney’s campaign for president. Well […]
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