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March 3, 2018 @ 7:41 pm
· Filed under Language and the law, Language attitudes, Lexicon and lexicography, This blogging life
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. […]
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February 22, 2018 @ 4:16 pm
· Filed under Language and the law
(Cross-posted from LAWnLinguistics.) When grammatical questions come up in legal cases, the lawyers and judges will want to support their arguments and analyses with citations to books about grammar. Most of the time, they cite books intended for a general audience, such as the McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, The Elements of Grammar, […]
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September 29, 2016 @ 4:07 pm
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Humor, Language and computers, Prescriptivist poppycock, Usage advice
Let me explain, very informally, what a predictive text imitator is. It is a computer program that takes as input a passage of training text and produces as output a new text that is composed quasi-randomly except that it matches the training text with regard to the frequencies of word or character sequences up to […]
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July 4, 2016 @ 10:29 am
· Filed under agreement, Ignorance of linguistics, Pedagogy, Peeving, prepositions, Prescriptivist poppycock, Usage advice, Writing
The many Americans in the University of Edinburgh's community of language and information scientists had to celebrate the glorious 4th on the 3rd this year, because the 4th is an ordinary working Monday. I attended a Sunday-afternoon gathering kindly hosted by the Head of the School of Informatics, Johanna Moore. We barbecued steadfastly in the […]
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March 19, 2016 @ 8:10 am
· Filed under Language and politics
From reader Brad D: You've been doing some interesting studies of Trump's speech patterns, and I wonder, have you done an analysis of his overall word choice since he started running for President? Watching him speak in interviews, I often get the impression that he's translating his thoughts into small words so as not to seem […]
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December 18, 2015 @ 8:45 am
· Filed under Linguistic history
In "A quantitative history of which-hunting", I reproduced a plot due to (an anonymous colleague of) Jonathan Owen, showing that texts from the last half of the 20th century saw a decrease in the relative frequency of NOUN which VERB, and an increase in the relative frequency of NOUN that VERB. Jonathan took this to indicate the […]
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April 9, 2015 @ 4:46 am
· Filed under Humor, Usage
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 […]
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July 15, 2014 @ 3:15 pm
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and the media, passives, Prescriptivist poppycock, Style and register, Usage advice
Radley Balko's Washington Post article "The curious grammar of police shootings" begins by reminding us about "mistakes were made" (an utterance so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page), and proceeds to quote a description of a shooting that is not by a policeman ("The suspect produced a semi-automatic handgun and fired numerous times […]
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January 17, 2014 @ 6:29 pm
· Filed under Prescriptivist poppycock
John McIntyre ("You have not seen it all yet", You Don't Say 1/17/2014) relays a correspondent's claim to have gotten this note from her college professor: Look up Strunk and White (1918) for good rules on writing. Also, I recommend you do not use prepositions at the beginning or end of sentences their use does […]
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December 24, 2012 @ 9:51 am
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Usage advice
Reddit, for those few who might not know, is a popular bulletin-board site for posting and discussing links and texts. A voting system determines the order and position of entries. The site is divided into "subreddits" devoted to paticular topics, of which there are now tens of thousands. One of these countless subreddits is /r/grammar. Here "grammar", as […]
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November 30, 2012 @ 8:42 am
· Filed under Morphology, Prescriptivist poppycock, Syntax, This blogging life, Usage advice
Some Language Log readers may feel that the two rules I discuss in my latest post on Lingua Franca, "One Rule to Ring Them All," are stated too loosely for their consequences to be clear. Let me explain here just a little more carefully. The topic under discussion is whether who should be in the […]
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September 29, 2012 @ 8:41 am
· Filed under Language and the media, Variation
According to Cordelia Hebblethwaite, "Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English", BBC News 9/26/2012: There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British English is invading America too. "Spot on – it's just ludicrous!" […]
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September 2, 2012 @ 7:51 am
· Filed under Usage advice
In 1917, The Nation's book reviewer objected to "the inexcusable irregularity of the style" in Helen Marie Bennett's Women and work: the economic value of college training, listing a number of specific "blunders" as evidence. One of these "blunders" can be found in the following passage: College girls may not realize why it is that many […]
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