Clik here to view.
Attititudes and attributions
A Language Log posting by Geoff Pullum that started with the pronunciation of the composer Sibelius’s name in Finnish has diverged in many directions, one of them having to do with word-initial [h] in...
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A celebration of American English
Political consultant, pollster, and sloganeer Frank Luntz, in Words That Work (2007), pp. xiv-xv: IN DEFENSE OF LANGUAGE For the record, I love the English language. I have built a career attending to...
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X can’t mean Y
Back on 23 May on ADS-L, I noted an occurrence (in speech) of “The military can do so much”, clearly intended to mean, in the context, ‘the military can do only so much’ (i.e., not everything, or not a...
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Spectacular spelling fail
A Wisconsin highway sign, noted on The Smallest Minority site on July 30: (under the heading “Guvernment Skools” and filed under “Education”). The company that made the sign quickly fixed it (the...
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Zippylicious geographical names
Zippy is in love with words — beautiful words, somewhat ridiculous words, peculiar words, they’re all delicious to Zippy (a manifestation of word attraction). Names especially so. Here he is savoring...
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More diets
My recent posting on diets started with a distinction (not original with me, but generally recognized in dictionaries) between two principal senses of the count noun diet in English. Restricting the...
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National caricatures
On January 19 on the op-ed page of the NYT, the British writer and collector of miscellany (“curator of knowledge”) Ben Schott assembled a huge “glossary of arcane national caricatures from writers...
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And still they come
There seems to be no end to books proposing to fix people’s lives by fixing their “grammar” (in that all-embracing sense of grammar — my slogan is It’s All Grammar — that I frequently complain about),...
View ArticleAttititudes and attributions
A Language Log posting by Geoff Pullum that started with the pronunciation of the composer Sibelius’s name in Finnish has diverged in many directions, one of them having to do with word-initial [h] in...
View ArticleA celebration of American English
Political consultant, pollster, and sloganeer Frank Luntz, in Words That Work (2007), pp. xiv-xv: IN DEFENSE OF LANGUAGE For the record, I love the English language. I have built a career attending to...
View ArticleX can’t mean Y
Back on 23 May on ADS-L, I noted an occurrence (in speech) of “The military can do so much”, clearly intended to mean, in the context, ‘the military can do only so much’ (i.e., not everything, or not a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Spectacular spelling fail
A Wisconsin highway sign, noted on The Smallest Minority site on July 30: (under the heading “Guvernment Skools” and filed under “Education”). The company that made the sign quickly fixed it (the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Zippylicious geographical names
Zippy is in love with words — beautiful words, somewhat ridiculous words, peculiar words, they’re all delicious to Zippy (a manifestation of word attraction). Names especially so. Here he is savoring...
View ArticleMore diets
My recent posting on diets started with a distinction (not original with me, but generally recognized in dictionaries) between two principal senses of the count noun diet in English. Restricting the...
View ArticleNational caricatures
On January 19 on the op-ed page of the NYT, the British writer and collector of miscellany (“curator of knowledge”) Ben Schott assembled a huge “glossary of arcane national caricatures from writers...
View ArticleAnd still they come
There seems to be no end to books proposing to fix people’s lives by fixing their “grammar” (in that all-embracing sense of grammar — my slogan is It’s All Grammar — that I frequently complain about),...
View Article
