Yesterday afternoon, Mark Halpern sent me a response to last week's discussion of his book Language and Human Nature in the post "Progess and its enemies", 2/16/2009. It's presented below as a guest post, after the usual transformation from MS Word to html. (I take responsibility for any format or font errors that may have […]
Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage: The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it […]
March approaches, and just before the Ides of March (on the 13th and 14th, specifically) comes the Stanford Semantics Festival. This is the 10th; a program, with abstracts, will soon be up on the Stanford Linguistics site. As usual, I'm giving a paper (I'm not actually a semanticist, but I play one annually at SemFest), this year on […]
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A while back I commented on the New York Times's reluctance to print "get laid" (even in quoted speech). Then it occurred to me to check out what the paper did with the movie Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987: directed by Stephen Frears, screenplay by Hanif Kureishi). And, surprise, it had no problem with […]
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It didn't make William Safire's list of "'08-isms", but for me, the most prominent phrase of this political campaign has been ground game. Thus Bob Drogin and Robin Abcarian, "In Ohio, Obama's ground game outguns McCain's", LA Times 11/3/2008: Learning from the Bush effort, Obama has taken his fight directly into suburban and rural GOP […]
According to Ben Smith ("Palin allies report rising campaign tension", Politico, 10/25/2008): Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said […]
My posting on Clark Hoyt's column on the NYT's practices in referring to people by name has elicited interesting commentary, some of which I'll talk about here. There were two sets of Times practices Hoyt discussed: the use of "courtesy titles" (that is, Title + LN [last name], in Mrs. Clinton or Senator Clinton, rather […]
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Virtually zero linguistic content in this story (unless you count the tie between language and other aspects of presentation of self), though it's an ACADEMIC story, and the Language Loggers all have academic associations (we're in the academy or in associated technological fields or participate in the Industry of the Intellect in some other way). […]
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The dangers of TV-studio live mics were demonstrated again yesterday, this time by Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy after an interview by Chuck Todd on MSNBC. Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse. The relevant segment: Mike Murphy: They're […]
In case you haven't already seen it, or heard it discussed anywhere, here's the cover of the 21 July New Yorker ("The Politics of Fear" by Barry Blitt): One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong (from Sesame Street). Question: which one?
There's a long tradition of popular peeving about dictionaries and what they have entries for: non-standard items, slang, taboo words, slurs, and so on. The complaint is that by listing these items the dictionaries are recognizing them as acceptable in the language, are "condoning" them (even when the items have appropriate usage labels attached to […]
Success has many fathers, the old saying has it, and the same goes for a well-turned maxim. We've noted a number of different originators for what Jed Hartman called the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: corrections of linguistic error are themselves inevitably prone to error. Around 1999 this truism was hit upon by no less than […]
When it comes to taboo mystification, sometimes the New York Times is just too damn coy. Last November, the name of the punk band "Fucked Up" ended up rendered in a Times concert review as a string of eight asterisks, with some oblique talk about how the name wasn't fit to print in the Times, […]