Archive | Language

A slogan of a Portland restaurant that I ran across with a Yelp search. (According to Yelp, the food is very good there.) According to dictionary.com, one of the definitions of “foregone” is “that has gone before; previous; past” — yet I think most readers would recognize the usage in the quote as extremely unidiomatic […]

Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) has an interesting post on usage debates and political debates; you should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt: [T]he insistence on regulation by prescriptive “rules”, in whatever relationship to the direction of linguistic history, is another interesting inversion of the standard political metaphors as applied to matters of […]

Trying to figure out how to refer to Solzhenitsyn, I did a Google Ngrams search comparing Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Alexander (the translation) was in the lead, though the transliteration Aleksandr has recently been almost nearly as popular. Alexandr is very rare. For 19th and early 20th century Russians that have easily […]

See here for more advanced features, including part-of-speech searching and much more. Thanks to Prof. Ben Zimmer (Language Log) for the pointer.

Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) is unimpressed with the claim that Gov. Chris Christie “used the word ‘I’ 30 times, plus a couple of ‘me’s’ and ‘my’s’ tossed in for seasoning” in his speech, and that this somehow says something important about Christie. Liberman had in the past responded similarly to those who made similar […]

Prof. Geoff Nunberg (Language Log) has an excellent NPR “Fresh Air” item about the unfounded condemnation of “hopefully” as a sentence adverb. An excerpt: That floating hopefully had been around for more than thirty years in respectable venues when a clutch of usage critics including Theodore Bernstein and E. B. White came down on it […]

Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) has all about this “exchange” — in this instance, a literal fistfight rather than a figurative one — all about whether to “elevate the status of Russian to a second language, equal to Ukrainian, in about half the regions of the country, including Kiev.” You have to see the picture, […]

Prof. Julie Sedivy (Language Log) has a very interesting post about a British film ratings controversy involving a Ken Loach movie that uses the word “cunt.” The film rating people are distinguishing “aggressive” uses of the word from “non-aggressive” uses; a British commentator faults this for being a double standard, and a class-based one at […]

An interesting project, covered in this New York Times ArtsBeat item. An excerpt: To demonstrate the validity of Twitter-based research, Mr. Russ searched through some 400,000 Twitter posts coming from identifiable locations and zeroed in on three different linguistic variables, starting with the regional distribution of “soda” vs. “pop” or “Coke,” something that has been […]

A few thoughts — perhaps helpful to law review editors and authors — about what’s customary in American legal publications. [Added: My sense is that this is also customary in most other books and journals, but I can speak with the most confidence about the custom in legal publications.] 1. Place commas and periods inside […]

Earlier this month, I blogged about assertionism — my label for usage claims that sound like prescriptivism, but are actually bare assertions: They don’t rely on any claims about what the (supposed) Linguistic Authorities say, on any detailed logical arguments, or on claims about allegedly superior clarity or precision; they just consist of a person’s […]

Our readers likely know that I have many disagreements with prescriptivists when it comes to English usage. But while I have philosophical disagreements with prescriptivists in general, my main practical disagreements are with people who might best be labeled “assertionists” — people who don’t just say that prescriptions set forth by some supposed authorities define […]

Some people categorically criticize the passive voice, a criticism that Prof. Geoffrey Pullum (of Language Log) has long and colorfully condemned; his latest salvo is an excellent post in the Chronicle of Legal Education‘s Lingua Franca blog on the subject. (For my thoughts on the subject, see here.)