"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a […]
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Non-linguists frequently ask me whether I am avidly watching "Fry's Planet Word", the new five-part BBC television series on language written and presented by Stephen Fry. (A bit of googling will probably find it for those outside the UK who can't access the BBC iPlayer; there are various illicit copies around, including some on YouTube.) […]
Unlike the fly-genetics text for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) and other amusing by-products of algorithmic trading run amok, this amazon.com page features a real price that some people apparently pay for a real product:
As my friends and acquaintances know, I'm a rather unreliable correspondent. I write a lot of messages, and I make a lot of phone calls, but the list of messages and calls that I ought to make always grows larger. In fact, there seems to be a sort of positive feedback principle at work, whereby […]
Judging by the popular vote, I've done an epically inadequate job of holding up my end of the Economist's debate "This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think": the Pro side is winning in a landslide, 78% to 22%.
A new motion is open for debate today in the Economist's online series: "This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think". Lera Boroditsky is the designated defender of the motion, and I was recruited to be the designated opponent. In this format, each side submits an opening statement, a rebuttal, and […]
A few weeks after John McWhorter and I participated in a "diavlog" on Bloggingheads, the site is hosting another language-y conversation between Joshua Knobe of Yale and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford. Whereas the previous diavlog touched briefly on neo-Whorfian arguments about the culturally determined relations of language to thought (responding to a New York Times […]
Bloggingheads, home of the "diavlog," is now featuring a discussion that I had with fellow Language Logger John McWhorter about a whole range of linguistic issues, from lexical chunking to pop-Whorfianism to Obama's Indonesian skills to the language of Mad Men. Something for everyone!
Yesterday we discussed this puzzling passage from Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 review in The Nation of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: Edward Sapir, Whorf's teacher, was an armchair linguist influenced by Bertrand Russell and Ludvig [sic] Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language. Where in the world, I wondered, did Ms. Mlinko get the bizarre […]
A couple of weeks ago, I promised to say something about Guy Deutscher's 8/26/2010 NYT magazine article, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?". I was reminded of this still-unfulfilled obligation by Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 piece in The Nation, "Bluer Rather Than Pinker", which is a review of the new book (Through the Language Glass: […]
Chris at The Lousy Linguist has an excellent post — "the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters", 9/1/2010 — describing and discussing Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Sonja Eisenbeiss, and Bhuvana Narasimhan, "Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events", Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, 2006. We'll come back to the Bohnemeyer et […]
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A month ago, I linked to Lera Boroditsky's WSJ piece "Lost in Translation", and promised to discuss the contents in more detail at some point in the future ("Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame", 7/26/2010). At the time, I noted that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and […]