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June 12, 2009 @ 11:31 am
· Filed under passives, Syntax, Usage advice
You readers are not going to like this, because you've heard too much on the topic already, and you are begging for relief; but I am going to report it anyway. My job is not to be merciful; my job is to get stuff out there, on the record. Charles Krauthammer, whom the Financial Times […]
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June 10, 2009 @ 4:46 am
· Filed under passives, Syntax
It is clear that *Kansas hasn't had executed anyone since 1965 is ungrammatical. What was responsible for the editing mistake that led to its appearing in this page on the Wall Street Journal's law blog? Quite possibly, suggested Victor Steinbok to the American Dialect Society mailing list early this morning, a sentence-planning botch that resulted […]
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November 7, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and politics, Language and the media, passives
It's time once again for our semi-regular feature, "Mr. Payack Bamboozles the Media." Paul J.J. Payack, as Language Log readers know, is the assiduously self-promoting president of the Global Language Monitor who has managed to hoodwink unsuspecting journalists on a range of pseudoscientific claims, most notably the number of words in the English language. (He […]
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June 7, 2022 @ 10:47 am
· Filed under Questions, Tests
An anonymous contributor was curious what the real and would-be copy-editors who hang around LL might make of the below — which may serve to represent for those unfamiliar what is actually going on within the so-called "Language & Writing" portion of our now-acclaimed, now-derided "Scholastic Aptitude [no wait Assessment] Test". The anonymous contributor can give the correct […]
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January 16, 2022 @ 9:56 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics
A recent PhD Comics strip:
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January 10, 2021 @ 10:36 am
· Filed under Peeving, Syntax
I've been resisting topics like "words for coup" and "the meaning of insurrection" — we'll see how long that resolve lasts — but this morning's distraction is the rebirth of something I wrote about many years ago, namely an online service for identifying instances of passive-voice verbs. In my review of 'The Passivator" (4/6/2004), I […]
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September 21, 2020 @ 1:15 pm
· Filed under Humor
A guest post (guest list?) by Anthony Bladon: A verb walks into a bar, sees an attractive noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines. An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars. A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and […]
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May 12, 2020 @ 2:31 pm
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics
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February 16, 2019 @ 9:33 am
· Filed under Speech technology
Ordinary language and technical terminology often diverge. We've covered the "passive voice" case at length. I don't think we've discussed the fact that for botanists, cucumbers and tomatoes are berries but strawberries and raspberries aren't — but there are many examples of such terminological divergence in fields outside of linguistics. However, the technical terminology is […]
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October 21, 2018 @ 11:05 am
· Filed under Ambiguity, Language and the law, Lexicon and lexicography, Words words words
An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. In my last post (longer […]
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August 9, 2018 @ 1:28 pm
· Filed under Etymology, Historical linguistics, Language and the law, Lexicon and lexicography
An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. With this post, I begin […]
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January 12, 2018 @ 7:25 am
· Filed under Language and the media, Syntax
Zoe Williams, "With the NHS, reality has finally caught up with Theresa May", The Guardian 1/8/2018 [emphasis added]: “If you look across the NHS, experience is different,” the prime minister flailed, as if the fact there wasn’t a stroke victim waiting for four hours in an ambulance outside every hospital was proof of her competence. […]
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February 23, 2017 @ 9:34 am
· Filed under Peeving, Usage
I recently saw a list of revisions suggested by the editor of a scientific journal, which combined technical issues with a number of points of English usage, including these two: Please try to avoid the word ‘impact,’ unless it is part of a proper name. It is now over-used (its ‘impact’ is diminished), and doesn’t communicate […]
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