Language Log

Paul Armstrong has reminded me of the Authors@Google videos (available on YouTube) — videos of authors talking at Google on their recent books. At least five are of interest to linguists: Noam Chomsky (4/25/08) Erin McKean (3/29/06) Geoffrey Nunberg (10/12/06) Steven Pinker (9/24/07) John Searle (10/30/07) [Added 2/2: Ray Jackendoff (8/30/07) George Lakoff (7/12/07) George […]

When Chief Justice John Roberts and Barack Obama made a hash of the presidential oath of office on Tuesday, most early commentators — including me — assumed it didn't really matter what they said, since Obama had officially become president at noon (shortly before they actually got to the oath). But some legal scholars pointed […]

The Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award, presented last night in San Francisco to Language Log, is quite a big deal. Contributions through any kind of medium between December 2003 and December 2007 were eligible to be nominated: books, documentary films, magazine articles, software, lecture series, or any other kinds of work that could reach […]

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode): The […]

In a recent exchange ("Pinker on Palin's 'nucular'", 10/5/2008; "Pinker contra Nunberg re nuclear/nucular", 10/17/2008; "Nucular riposte", 10/18/2008), Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Nunberg disagreed, among other things, about whether President George W. Bush is engaging in "conscious linguistic slumming" when he uses the pronunciation commonly written as "nucular". Geoff argued that George Bush … can't […]

Steve Pinker understates the case when he says that there's a master's thesis in "nucular" studies: I envision dissertations, conferences, endowed chairs, journals, broken marriages…

Mark Liberman's post on a recent xkcd strip unleashed a flurry of comments about jokes that follow the template, "X-er? I hardly know 'er!" (The strip used "supercollider" in the template, an apparent homage to "Futurama.") Commenters were also reminded of a somewhat similar bit of musty British humo(u)r: A: My wife's gone to the […]

A couple of days ago I reported on an article in last week's New Scientist, "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The New Scientist article reports on some neat experiments in an article in PNAS involving how people represent events non-linguistically, e.g. when miming. The main result, as the New Scientist reporter saw it, is that people […]

In the (figurative) pages of Slate, Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon have begun a six-part series on "The Sex Difference Evangelists", with four parts so far: Meet the Believers (1 July) Pick a Little, Talk a Little (1 July) Empathy Queens (2 July) Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones (3 July) The series focuses on two […]

In today's Boston Globe it's my honor to pinch-hit for a vacationing Jan Freeman, who writes a fantastic weekly column called "The Word." I took the opportunity to write about a word popularized by the new movie "Kung Fu Panda": skadoosh. Or is it skidoosh? Or maybe skedoosh?

Steve Pinker swung by Edinburgh yesterday to deliver a masterful Enlightenment Lecture to a crowd of roughly a thousand, and to sign copies of The Stuff of Thought for eager fans. As usual, both on the stage and off, Steve had a fund of funny anecdotes, surprising facts, and new ideas about language; and he […]

Yesterday, Mr. Verb asked some questions about morphology and politics: On News Hour just now, I swear I heard Bush talk about the Tibe[tʃ]an people. I'm puzzled. This is a case of /t/, like the last sound in Tibet, affricating, that is, becoming a 'ch' sound. That is hardly in and or itself striking — […]