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.

Prescriptivist peeving has faded from public discourse, but UK politics recently brought us a blast from the past:

Bob Shackleton sent a link to this headline: "After 700 Years Underwater Divers Recovered 80-Ton Blocks from the Long-Lost Lighthouse of Alexandria", ZME Science 7/5/2026. His comment: "That’s a long time for a diver to stay underwater…"

At BMR, the first thing the doctors, nurses, and techs ask patients when they interview them is "Do you feel any pain?"  And they want you to quantify it on a scale of 1-3-5 / small-medium-big. What is pain?  Physical, mental? I tend to think of it rather as Sanskrit duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/ दुःख) than as […]

Anne Abeillé's recently-published book "La Grammaire se Rebelle" describes linguistic prescriptivism as "la jungle puriste" / "the purist jungle". But wait, don't prescriptivists want to turn the natural linguistic wilderness into a well-tended formal garden? Maybe, but in fact prescriptive rules are often incoherent as well as contrary to elite as well as informal usage, […]

Politics aside, there's been some prescriptivist reaction to (part of) a Signal exchange between White House aides Anthony Salisbury and Patrick Weaver about the idea of deploying the 82nd Airborne to Portland. From  The Guardian : “Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways […]

Liam Julian, "Putting Fowler back in Fowler's" (Hoover Institution, 2009) presents a perspective that used to be more common that it is today, I think: linguistic prescriptivism as (a particular kind of) cultural conservatism, in explicit association with right-wing politics. Julian wrote: Burchfield, in his preface to Fowler’s third edition, called the first edition “this […]