Language Log

A few days ago, Ben Goldacre, or someone pretending to be him on twitter, tweeted dear everyone, when i read your passive sentence constructions i sort of have to convert them into active ones in my head because i'm thick. As Geoff Pullum recently observed I despair when I see this kind of drivel. What […]

The most recent xkcd offers some sound editorial guidance:

From the Fox TV forensic psychology police-procedural show Lie To Me (Male Investigator is talking to Female Investigator about a suicide note she has decided is fake): Male Investigator: Let me ask you something: how can you tell if this thing is fake if it's been typed? Female Investigator: Word choice, repetition, and the use […]

Back in June of 2002, one of William Safire's On Language columns began this way: 'The South Carolina primary between Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in 2000," wrote Eleanor Randolph, the New York Times editorialist, referring to Representative Lindsey Graham's current campaign for the Senate, "left Republicans in his state bitter and divided. That said, […]

Hannah Poturalski, "Basketball legend visits Kenton", Lima News, 6/19/2009: Thursday evening nearly 70 members of the Ohio State Alumni Club of Hardin County, as well as community members, saw an animated presentation by [Jerry] Lucas on the new way he plans on revolutionizing learning. Lucas, now 69, said he's been involved in memory training his […]

Two things from recent days: first, I posted on my blog about, among other things, the innovated verb bigger 'make bigger, enlarge', noting that zero-verbing of adjectives is not very frequent in English; and then, yesterday's New York Times Magazine was an issue about "The Green Mind", which reminded me of the now-ubiquitous use of […]

In a comment yesterday, Emily asked: I tutor the SATs, including the writing section, in addition to helping students with other kinds of writing. What am I supposed to tell my students about zombie rules? The fact is that some misguided teachers and graders may enforce them. (SAT graders not so much, though–-I think I'm […]

In its article on Google's year-end "Zeitgeist" listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports: The things people around the globe have in common are a strong interest in socialising and politics, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search at Google. "Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries […]

A while back I commented on the New York Times's reluctance to print "get laid" (even in quoted speech). Then it occurred to me to check out what the paper did with the movie Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987: directed by Stephen Frears, screenplay by Hanif Kureishi). And, surprise, it had no problem with […]

Mark Liberman has reported on a use of the transitive verb quiesce 'render inactive', in a passive used adjectivally: "Server is currently quiesced". Transitive quiesce seems to be almost entirely restricted to computer contexts, and also to be recent enough to have escaped general dictionaries.

A couple of days ago, in response to John Gonzalez's question "Where does this unit rank among the most beloved Philly sports teams of all time?", Phil Sheridan answered: For me, this team has to rank up there with the Flyers' Stanley Cup-winning teams for sheer beloved-osity. This reminded me of a question from a […]

Here are two snippets from news items about the actor Shia LaBeouf, who was recently involved in a car accident: Shia LaBeouf has been released from hospital in Los Angeles, five days after he crushed his hand in a car crash. (Contact Music, Aug. 2) The "Transformers" star didn't just injure, but crushed his hand […]

One of the oldest and most interesting arguments for evolution is Ernst Haeckel's theory of recapitulation: the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In the form that Haeckel proposed — that embryological development progresses though a series of fully-developed ancestral forms — this theory has been refuted many times over the past century. What remains is […]