Language Log

Today on The Atlantic I break down Watson's big win over the humans in the Jeopardy!/IBM challenge. (See previous Language Log coverage here and here.) I was particularly struck by the snowclone that Ken Jennings left on his Final Jeopardy response card last night: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." I use that […]

In "Snowclones are the dark matter of journalism", 1/24/2004, I noted the spread of the phrasal template X is the dark matter of Y: "The PC is the Dark Matter of the Internet", "Global technoscience is the dark matter of social theory", "Networking is the dark matter of high-speed internet", "Terrorism is the dark matter […]

With this post I reach my thousandth Language Log contribution. I wrote 676 posts for the old series, before the original server died in agony in April 2008. Those were written from Santa Cruz, California (between 2003 and 2005 and in 2006-2007), from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard (2005-2006), and from Edinburgh, Scotland (2007-2008) The […]

Spotted by Jonathan Lighter on a recent trip to Iceland: "A big ad for 66°North fashions, prominently displayed at Keflavik Airport, telling passengers everywhere that There are over [a] 100 words for snow in Icelandic. Only one for what to wear."

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log: All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase […]

William Safire has passed away, and it is no small measure of his impact that even linguabloggers who were most critical of his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig) have been quick to post their sincere condolences. Grant Barrett has written about his generosity of spirit, and I […]

My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for "Science Saturday." For Carl's latest installment, the Bloggingheads producers suggested he interview me about lexicography and other wordy stuff. Many of the topics we cover, from lexical blends to snowclones, will be familiar […]

The lines between different sorts of formulaic expressions are often hard to draw: idiom, snowclone, cliché, catchphrase, or what? Yesterday I posted on my blog about a case that combines features of snowclones and idioms: the formula THE WHOLE X 'the whole matter, everything to do with the matter', the most famous exemplar of which […]

Over on The Loom, the blogging home of my brother Carl Zimmer, a discussion about bad science writing was sparked by a particularly noxious Esquire article. (The description of cardiologist Hina Chaudhry as "a lab-worn doctor-lady" is just the tip of the iceberg.) In the comments, David Fishman left the cryptic remark, "Consider the armadillo." […]

Google Suggest is an fun new tool for probing the textual Zeitgeist. Using it on "Language Log" yields: Bare "Language Log" gets 36,900,000 results (as we can see by getting suggested continuations for "language lo", though I'll spare you the picture). It's clear that lots of regular readers use Google to find us, rather than […]

Snowclones, those endlessly flexible phrasal templates, have already spawned their own database, launched by Erin O'Connor in March 2007. Now Mark Peters, who has helped bring snowclones to the masses in articles for Psychology Today, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Good, has created an even cozier online niche: a blog devoted to a single snowclone. […]

Yesterday, 10 November, was International Human Rights Day, and for the occasion two San Franciscans spearheaded a protest and boycott (across the U.S.) on behalf of gay rights and in opposition to California's Proposition 8 (which banned same-sex marriage).  Two points of linguistic interest: the name of the event is "A Day Without a Gay" (sometimes reported as "A […]

Peter Ringeisen writes to ask "why it is that educated people use ungrammatical obsolete verb endings?" — a question inspired by this passage in Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times op-ed column today: Globalization giveth — it was this democratization of finance that helped to power the global growth that lifted so many in India, China […]