Reader A.T. writes: When I can't sleep, I go onto TED.com. I'm watching a talk by Pinker and he says syllabuses at one point (about 15:36). Not sure if you've blogged about syllabuses versus syllabi in the Language Log, but I think it'd be a pretty cool topic to discuss.
Yesterday we discussed this puzzling passage from Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 review in The Nation of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: Edward Sapir, Whorf's teacher, was an armchair linguist influenced by Bertrand Russell and Ludvig [sic] Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language. Where in the world, I wondered, did Ms. Mlinko get the bizarre […]
A couple of weeks ago, I promised to say something about Guy Deutscher's 8/26/2010 NYT magazine article, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?". I was reminded of this still-unfulfilled obligation by Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 piece in The Nation, "Bluer Rather Than Pinker", which is a review of the new book (Through the Language Glass: […]
Nicholas Wade, "In Harvard Lab Inquiry, a Raid and a 3-Year Wait", NYT 8/13/2010, gives some additional information about the Marc Hauser scandal. The new information is still basically rumor — the result of interviews with sources both anonymous and not, with the non-anonymous information being largely second hand. But it all suggests that whatever […]
Reader MH wrote to ask "I was wondering if the following phenomenon is backed up by any data, and if so, if it's unique to English", with respect to a bit of Twitter social science, wherein happymrlocust asked Tell me twitter, when you refer to your grandparents together, who comes first, the grandmother or the […]
Steve Pinker's recent NYT review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book suggests a valuable coinage ("Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective", 11/7/2009; emphasis added) : An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects […]
[Below is a guest post by Dan Everett] On the 22nd of December, 1942, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss were having lunch at the Faculty Club of Columbia University when Boas fell from his chair. Lévi-Strauss tried to revive him, but to no avail. The founder of American anthropology died of a heart attack, in […]
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Recently arrived in the mail: an advance copy of Jan Freeman's Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The celebrated cynic's language peeves deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st-century readers [NY: Walker & Company, publication date November 19] (The subtitle of Bierce's 1909 booklet is A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, which should give you an idea […]
A recent "joke of the day" from Comedy Central: A crowded flight is cancelled, and a frazzled agent must rebook a long line of inconvenienced travelers by herself. Suddenly, an angry passenger pushes to the front and demands to be on the next flight, first class. The agent replies, "I'm sorry, sir. I'll be happy […]
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Several people have drawn my attention to a harmonic convergence of LL topics on CNN.com today: social media, gender-neutral pronouns, and linguistic time machines. The article is Elizabeth Landau, "On Twitter, is it 'he or she' or 'they' or 'ip'?", and Ms. Landau is worried that English will be unable to reach the epicene ideal, […]
John McIntyre's grammatical noir, serialized in his Baltimore Sun blog You Don't Say in preparation for National Grammar Day tomorrow, is now complete: "Down these mean sentences I walk alone", 2/14/2009 "'What are we going to do now?' she asked", 2/18/2009 "The Fat Man chuckles", 2/23/2009 "The rule you don't break", 3/2/2009
Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com specializes in quantitative modeling of political trends, but yesterday he posted a terminological discussion of political philosophy, "The Two Progressivisms", distinguishing what he calls Rational Progessivism from what he calls Radical Progressivism. This reminded me of something that I noticed recently in reading Mark Halpern's book Language and Human Nature, namely […]
Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage: The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it […]