Some eloquent 17th-century Quaker peeving, from The history of the life of Thomas Ellwood: Or, an account of his birth, education, &c. with divers observations on his life and manners when a youth: … Also several other remarkable passages and occurrences. Written by his own hand. To which is added, a supplement by J. W., […]
The publisher's blurb for the fourth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage introduces a new feature: With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book — now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. […] The judgments here are backed up […]
John McIntyre has identified the "split verb rule" as "The Dumbest Rule in the AP Stylebook" (You Don't Say, 4/9/2016): [A]s you look through Garner, Fowler, MWDEU, and language authorities whom you reckon by the dozens on the subject of the split infinitive, you will not find them treating what the AP Stylebook imagines is […]
Today's xkcd illustrates a technique pioneered by Bill Labov: Mouseover title: "BREAKING: Senator's bold pro-podium stand leads to primary challenge from prescriptivist base."
Bob Moore sent in a link to a story (Brooke Crothers, "Windows 10 will only work on newest PCs, says Microsoft", Fox News 1/18/2016), and commented: I was confused when I saw this, because I am already running Windows 10 on several older PCs. When I read the article, I realized that what they meant to […]
Melvin Jules Bukiet, "What's Your Pronoun?", The Chronicle Review 9/21/2015: [H]aving learned to adapt to unexpected or previously unknown pronouns, I am confronted by a new wrinkle in the language of identification. As one of the staff members at the college where I teach recently informed the faculty, "Some of the students will prefer to […]
Scott Walker recently got into a little trouble for a preposterous proposal that he put forward on Meet the Press. The headlines tell the story: "Scott Walker: Canada-U.S. border wall worth considering", CNBC News; "Scott Walker: U.S.-Canada wall a 'legitimate' idea", CNN; "Scott Walker says wall along Canadian border is worth reviewing", AP. Except that Walker never made any […]
In 1711, long before E.B. White over-interpreted the Fowler brothers and sent out mobs of zombified prescriptivists to hunt down whiches, Richard Steele gave us "The Humble Petition of WHO and WHICH", The Spectator 78: ' The humble Petition of WHO and WHICH, ' SHEWETH, ' THAT your petitioners being in a forlorn and destitute condition, know not to […]
John McIntyre's "Grammarnoir 7: 'The Corpus Had a Familiar Face'" is available at The Baltimore Sun. At the start of the story, a thug with "fists the size of Westphalian hams and the cold, dead eyes of a community press content coach" strong-arms John's narrator into a big room "with a glass wall overlooking a formal garden. Around […]
Some clarifications about my Wall Street Journal article, which seems to have led to some misunderstandings among Language Log’s readers (as well as over at Languagehat). Since the readers here are the most well-informed audience that piece will ever reach outside of professional linguists, I thought it’d be useful to clarify what I based the […]
Where do zombies come from? As Wikipedia tells us, it all started with evil Haitian sorcerers using necromancy to create undead slaves. But then, Hollywood invented contagious zombification, originally attributed to radioactive contamination from Venus, but more recently understood to be due to human zombism virus (HZV). As for zombie rules, all that we really know, in most […]
From Megan Stone, via Heidi Harley: A friend of mine, who was an English major with me in undergrad, runs the Twitter account for MBTA, the Boston public transportation system. This morning, she posted the following: “#MBTA #OrangeLine Svc is suspended at DTX due to a Medical Emergency. For Green Line Svc, please board at […]
In recent years, The New Yorker's coverage of the "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" divide in English usage has been, shall we say, problematic. In 2012, we had Joan Acocella's "The English Wars," critiqued by Mark Liberman here and here. That was followed up by Ryan Bloom's Page-Turner piece, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which I tackled […]