I don’t often create posts that involve extensive quotations from other blogs, but I so enjoyed Prof. Pullum’s Language Log entry on vagueness and British weather that I feel compelled to quote it here: Those many idealistic souls who imagine that we would do better with a language that was free of vagueness and ambiguity, […]
Category Archives: Language
Do LG/Verizon hate commas? or: Weird interface things with the LG Dare
A while back I bought an LG Dare. Mostly I like it fairly well, but it has a couple of problems — even leaving aside the fact that it’s now restarted spontaneously four times since I bought it. One is that it’s hard for it to distinguish between scrolling and selecting. Oddly, the browser and […]
Election 2008: two linguistic moments
This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail […]
A cooler title
I really enjoy being a bona fide professional linguist, with said title on my business card, but I have found a title that is, I think, even cooler, belonging to Jesse Sheidlower (whose surname I would dearly love to know how to pronounce). Jesse is, according to his byline on this Slate article about Sarah […]
Peeve cubed
I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but I would like to say that I think Language Log has thoroughly worn out its/their welcome on entries that solely constitute being peeved by people being peeved about (various things) about language. It’s still moderately interesting when they explore the history and usage of the […]
Getting off-topic
I thought I might be imagining it, but I don’t think so anymore: Language Log is getting less focused and less good than it used to be. Bill Poser today wrote an entry about how runners hear the start gun at different times because of the speed of sound in air. The ‘hook’ used to […]
Topic-fronting with “I know from”
Reading Barbara’s lovely discussion about “how local to go”, I was blindsided by this amazing sentence: Cornmeal, we know from, but millet — to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed. The “we know from” construction is fairly familiar to me from informal speech and writing. It’s a favorite of Sars. A few examples from her: […]
Wordly!
Not surprisingly, when I created a Wordle it came out with a lot of cycling words. Hat tip: Annie Mole
Reality of language
I almost have a hard time believing this, except that there are so many Google results for the word: Is hited a word?? People ask Yahoo Answers a lot of strange questions, including many that would be best answered by a dictionary and another whole batch that would be best answered by a philosopher, plus […]
How to relearn Spanish and have fun too
My Spanish is, to say the least, rusty. At one time in my life I could do literary analysis in Spanish and probably knew more technical poetry terms in Spanish than in English. These days it’s pretty much limited to “Hi, how are you?” (“Hola, como estás?” for those who didn’t just translate that in […]