When it comes to linguistics, convincing, worthwhile presentations (such as those by John McWhorter and Steven Pinker) are rare on TED; more typical are poorer ones (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here). If that is true for TED, then I wouldn't expect better from TEDx. Indeed, the one TEDx program on linguistics that […]
A couple of days ago, Geoff Pullum noted that William Zinsser's On Writing Well echoes the Strunkish advice that "Most adverbs are unnecessary" and "Most adjectives are also unnecessary" ("Awful book, so I bought it", 3/21/2015). I share Geoff's skepticism about this anti-modifier animus, and indeed about all writing advice based on parts of speech. But it […]
Part 2 of the Wikihow listicle "Be a Good Writer" is about learning vital skills, and item 3 of part 2 says you should "Learn the rules of grammar". Where should you turn to find out what they are? The article (as accessed on March 2, 2015) says: If you have a question about grammar, […]
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From David Randall via Steven Pinker: This sign was posted near the southern edge of Loveland, Colorado. It is no longer there. Is there a term for the strange, almost redundant phrase? Have you run across anything similar? There are certainly plenty of other instances on the web of the same word sequence.
In recent years, The New Yorker's coverage of the "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" divide in English usage has been, shall we say, problematic. In 2012, we had Joan Acocella's "The English Wars," critiqued by Mark Liberman here and here. That was followed up by Ryan Bloom's Page-Turner piece, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which I tackled […]
Those who have been following the Marc Hauser case, on LLOG or elsewhere, may have missed this: Carolyn Y. Johnson, "Harvard report shines light on ex-researcher's misconduct", Boston Globe 5/30/2014: When former Harvard pyschology professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible in a series of six scientific misconduct cases in 2012, he distanced himself from […]
. . . but not being yourself just might. There's been a lot of media interest recently in a new study of "vocal fry", sparked in part by an unusually detailed magazine article — Olga Khazan, "Vocal Fry May Hurt Women's Job Prospects", The Atlantic 5/29/2014. Other coverage: Gail Sullivan, "Study: Women with creaky voices — also […]
Following up on "A nation in which supports dependency" (7/9/2012), Glenn Bingham has sent me an annotated compendium of "Samples in which hypercorrections are in", reproduced below as a guest post. Glenn's diagnosis is that these examples arise by way of an attempt to "sound erudite" by adding an extra preposition at the start of […]
Email from Dan Garrette: I am a Computer Science PhD student at UT-Austin working with Jason Baldridge, but I've recently been collaborating with my colleague Hannah Alpert-Abrams in the Comparative Literature department here at UT. We've been talking about the intersection of NLP and literary study and we are interested in looking at ways in […]
Recommended reading: Simon Fisher and Matt Ridley, "Culture, Genes, and the Human Revolution", Science 24 May 2013. (Another version is here.) A common assumption is that the emergence of behaviorally modern humans after 200,000 years ago required—and followed—a specific biological change triggered by one or more genetic mutations. […] This prevailing logic in the field […]
I recently wrote on Lingua Franca about my astonishment over Piotr Cichocki and Marcin Kilarski. In their paper "On 'Eskimo Words for Snow': The Life Cycle of a Linguistic Misconception" (Historiographia Linguistica 37, 2010, Pages 341-377), they mistook my 1989 humorous opinion column "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" for a research paper, and bitterly attacked […]
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Having learned his lesson in 2009, today Chief Justice Roberts apparently had the oath of office written out on a sheet of paper in his hand, and thereby avoided any uncertainties about adverb placement: [Audio clip: view full post to listen]
There have been many online remembrances of Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young programmer and Internet activist who killed himself on Friday at the age of 26. (See, for instance, Caleb Crain's piece for The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog and the many tributes linked therein.) It's typically noted that in 2005 Swartz founded the startup […]