Language Log

Allie Brosh, over at Hyperbole and a Half, is annoyed by people who leave out the space in "a lot" ("The Alot is Better Than You at Everything", 4/13/2010):

A few days ago at the Guardian, David Marsh brought out the stuffed body of George Orwell and propped it up in the pulpit ("Election 2010 – vote for the cliche you hate the most", 4/9/2010): George Orwell, in his brilliant 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: "When one watches some tired [political] […]

Over on my blog, I've been coming down hard on Ned Halley's Dictionary of Modern English Grammar, a dreadful volume purporting to be a guide to "grammar, syntax and style for the 21st century" (postings here, here, and here). When I find myself engaging with such a book, I usually try to read something more […]

Several readers have recommended Wednesday's Non Sequitur:

… the result is a grammatical bar brawl.  An excellent example is on display over at Ask MetaFilter, where someone innocently asked So which sentence is proper English grammar: "If you eat like Bob and me, you will be healthy." or "If you eat like Bob and I, you will be healthy." KA-POW: "it's the […]

If we come upon a glyph that we don't recognize and can't find in any dictionary, especially if we have half an idea what it might mean or what it might sound like, we are apt to call it a "variant character" (yìtǐzì 異體字) or calligraphic form of some standard glyph.  It happens all the […]

A matter that requires nuancing: Jinyi Kuang and Cristina Bicchieri, "Language matters: how normative expressions shape norm perception and affect norm compliance", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2024: Abstract: Previous studies have used various normative expressions such as ‘should’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘approved’ interchangeably to communicate injunctions and social norms. However, little […]

One of the hard parts of learning a new language is figuring out what preposition to use when (or what postposition, or what case, or etc.). This can be tricky even for simple locative expressions: I live in France. J'habite en France. I live in Paris J'habite à Paris. I live in Japan. J'habite au […]

Language remains a hot button across Canada: Quebec’s ‘Language Police’ Take Aim at Sneaky English Slang Authorities fret over ‘Franglais,’ the creep of words like ‘cool’ or ‘email’ into French discourse; even elevator music is scrutinized. By Vipal Monga, WSJ (12/13/23) —

From Philip Taylor: The British media were flooded yesterday with reports that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by scientific evidence presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.  My understanding of "bamboozle" has always been that deception must be involved, and this is borne out by the OED, but there was clearly no deception in […]

There seem to be a lot of people complaining about it these days, so maybe there's something to worry about here.  Francois Lang, who called this current wave of criticism to my attention asks whether academia is isolated from such horrors. FWIW, here's what it's like in business: "A look at the most annoying workplace […]

[Following up on the previous post…] David Owen wrote the following as empirical support for his claim that sentence-initial appositives ("Bad Things") are a recent innovation: I reread most of Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” and skimmed as much as a modern reader can stand of “The Rambler,” and penetrated as far as it’s humanly […]

David Owen, "The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve", The New Yorker 1/12/2023: Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. […] But some common practices are objectively objectionable, in my opinion. Here’s an example of a sentence type that I think no writer should ever use: A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs. […]