From Charles Krauthammer, "Obama Hovers From on High", Washington Post 6/12/2009: On religious tolerance, [president Obama] gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence" (note the use of the passive voice). He then criticized (in the active voice) Western religious intolerance […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also […]
In the first part of this post, we came across the notion of "bèi zìshā 被自殺" ("be suicided"). Since, for many people, this idea (of somebody being "suicided") is hard to comprehend, I asked several graduate students from the PRC if they could explain how it and the related expressions "bèi tiàolóu 被跳楼" ("was jumped […]
I'm at a motel in Nampa, Idaho. A sign posted on a side entrance reads: DO NOT LEAVE DOOR OPEN YOU WILL BE TRESPASSED.
The use of the verb positioned in this sentence, part of an article quoted in "'Dutch roll'", puzzled some commenters: The aircraft remained on the ground in Oakland until Jun 6th 2024, then positioned to Everett,WA (USA), ATS facilities, and is still on the ground in Everett 6 days later. But there are general processes […]
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 […]
A recent PhD Comics strip:
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 […]
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 […]