Reader SL asks for intervention in an disagreement about whether newspapers should use "gonna" in quotations: I got in an argument with a colleague, who used to be a journalist, even, about this. She said there is nothing wrong with transcribing what someone says accurately. My point is that this is a clear case of […]
Over at headsup: the blog, fev recently pondered variation in transcription practice ("Annals of g-droppin'", 6/6/2011). He starts by noting that the same paper edited the same quote, in the same AP story, to have -in' in some but not all gerund-participles in one version, but -ing throughout in another version. And his main concern […]
This use of "very not appreciative" caught my eye on Sunday: “I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, the national legislative director for Rolling Thunder, told the Washington Post. This construction is not in my own dialect; it reminds me of the recent broader uses of "so". ("I'm so […]
Mike Pence (R-IN), interviewed by Greta van Susteren on Fox News:
Tim Pawlenty's speech on March 7 to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition suprised many observers, and not entirely in a good way. Dana Milbank, "With Pawlenty's Iowa speech, a side of syrup", Washington Post 3/9/2011, wrote … Pawlenty is campaigning as if he's some sort of Southern preacher. At the Faith & Freedom event, […]
Jacob Weisberg, who turned the Bushisms industry into a nice source of income for six years or so, must be even more excited than Rupert Murdoch about the possibility that Sarah Palin will make a serious run for president in 2012. Weisberg's Palinisms feature at Slate has already notched 71 little items, and the first […]
David Wessel at the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog asked Alan Simpson what he meant by "give 'em the Green Weenie", and reports that When he was in the Army, he says, if you were mistreated or given some lousy task, you were said to have been given “the green weenie.” And if […]
In a recent LL post, I wrote about Northeast and Northwest Mandarin borrowings from Russian that — in the mouths of those who are not highly literate in characters — seem to have escaped the phonotactic constraints of the sinographic script. In this post, I write about a Beijing street name that began as a […]
There's been quite a bit of discussion about Sarah Palin's commentary on the Tucson shootings, and most of it has been about the segment where she characterizes criticism of her gunsight map as "a blood libel": [Audio clip: view full post to listen] If you don't like their ideas you're free to propose better ideas […]
David Cameron, the UK prime minister, spent the day before yesterday in Zurich with two high-power celebs, Prince William and the soccer star David Beckham, lobbying to get the World Cup soccer tournament hosted in Britain in 2018. Said Cameron: "We have got the stadia, we have got the facilities…", and I guess I was […]
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Over at the Economist's Johnson blog, R.L.G. has launched a quixotic bid to rescue malamanteau, which Randall Munroe coined as part of a joke about what R.L.G. calls Wikipedia's "over serious tone when discussing goofy topics." (The rest of Munroe's joke struck a little closer to home: the strip's mouseover title was "The article has […]
She hasn't announced her candidacy, and frankly, I doubt that she would accept a draft. But still, a curious chain of associations yesterday led me to wonder. It all started when Andrew Sullivan linked to an article by Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones on "Why Rick 'Man on Dog' Santorum can't beat his Google troubles": […]