Language Log

A tweet by Julia Ioffe from 10/4/2022 (image below because twitter embedding seems to be broken…):

The title of this post combines two topics that are popular with the Language Log audience, and that are not usually discussed together. It is also the title of a LAWnLinguistics post from 2012, shortly after the publication of Reading Law, a book about legal interpretation that was co-authored by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner. […]

Today's SMBC starts with this panel:

… at least about the use of  "summative that" in certain contexts. Thus one of Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage is "Vague Reference": Vague reference is a common problem in sentences where “this,” “it,” “which” or other such words don’t refer back to any one specific word or phrase, but a whole situation. […]

Jen wrote to inform me that today, being William Penn's birthday, is International Talk Like a Quaker Day. Jen explains that I like to combine it with my pirate talk from International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  "Arrr, thee must give us all thy money to donate to the Friends Service Committee, or we will […]

9 Chickweed Lane, for June 15, illustrates something about prescriptivist pain:

Is there any "prescriptivist science"? Could there be any? The reaction of some linguists will be that "prescriptivist science" is as much as a contradiction in terms as "creation science" is. But I disagree.

It's been a while since we had a post in the Prescriptivist Poppycock category. This example is more a case of badly-researched etymology, but we'll take what we can get, courtesy of Florent Moncomble, who writes: In the May update of the prescriptive « Dire, ne pas dire » section of their website, in a […]

In a recent article in Psychology Today, Nick Morgan proposes a new theory about the psychodynamics of prescriptivist peeving ("Why Bad Grammar Activates Our Fight-or-Flight Response", 12/14/2023): Does grammar matter? And did you have a teacher in your youth who insisted on drumming the rules of good grammar into you—and was that teacher on the […]

Back in the fall of 2022, I asked "What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?". I still don't have any actual counts, but I continue to find fewer instances of prescriptivist peeving in my various media feeds and foraging.

Rick Rubenstein commented on yesterday's post ("What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?"): Are there any proven therapies available for folks like me who, despite seeing the light decades ago, can't keep from wincing at "violations" of prescriptivist rules ingrained (mostly self-ingrained) during childhood? I want to be totally unfazed by "The team with the […]

An image symbolizing how American English pronoun usage has changed since 2004 — in undergrad residences at Penn, these buttons were distributed for use in start-of-semester meetings this fall:

[This is a guest post by Pamela Kyle Crossley] Just read the blog post on this. I feel like "I feel like" is one of those passive-aggressive tics that came in in the 1980/1990s, related to that thing where people turned statements into questions by raising their pitch at the end of a sentence (which […]