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.

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 […]

Ignorant prescriptivist peeving has recently been dying out in English-language mass media, or so it seems to me. But George Will is holding the line, as Viseguy points out in a comment on yesterday's "Vaccination" post. Will's July 30 piece, "Five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out", has the sub-head "The massive […]

Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also […]

Yesterday's guest post by Andreas Stolcke, "English influence on German spelling", covered Duden's grudging admission that 's is allowed in certain restricted contexts, and noted the widespread negative reaction attributing this "Deppenapostrophe" (= "idiot's apostrophe") to the malign influence of English. But Heike Wiese, via Joan Maling, sent a link to Anatol Stefanowitsch, "Apostrophenschutz", Sprachlog 4/26/2007, […]

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 […]