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There’s nowt wrong with children’s dialects
A minor linguistic storm arose in the UK last week after a Teesside school principal asked parents to “correct” their children’s informal speech – phrases such as it’s nowt (it’s nothing), I seen (I...
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Link love: language (51)
A more-or-less-monthly roundup of links on language, grammar, usage, writing, linguistics and such things. Browse at will and click your fill. Do animals have accents? Irish language used in space. Why...
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The dramatic grammatic evolution of “LOL”
LOL, the poster child of txtspk and internet lingo, began as a handy abbreviation for laughing out loud (and sometimes lots of love). But it has come to symbolise a whole mode of discourse: LOLspeak is...
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The Power of Babel: Dialects are all there is
In my recent post on the evolution of LOL, I included a video of John McWhorter, who has been studying this feature of language. One of his books, The Power of Babel, finally reached the top of my...
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I guess that’s why they call ‘thats’ the ‘whose’
Reading a review of the 1983 fantasy film Hundra (a feminist knockoff of Conan the Barbarian), I came across a pretty unusual word, albeit one that almost looks perfectly normal. Film historian Paul...
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Unrhetorical question
[click to enlarge] From the “Frazz” archives – comic strip by Jef Mallett. Filed under: humour, language, semantics, wordplay Tagged: cartoons, comics, detention, food, Frazz, humour, Jef Mallett,...
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Link love: language (52)
Time for another language linkfest. They grow quickly when I turn my back, one link giving rise to another. Anyway, it’s the usual mixum-gatherum of items relating to language, linguistics, words and...
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Sigh language
From io9 last week, “Every language needs its, like, filler words”: “Sigh language” is a lovely idea; as typos go it is unusually appealing. Kelly (@potterarchy) on Twitter suggested in jest that io9...
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Alexander Ellis on the chameleon nature of language
Alexander John Ellis (1814–90) was a musicologist, philologist and phonetician whose approach to language was systematic and descriptive. He gave primacy to speech over written forms, writing in...
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Book review: Sick English, by Janet Byron Anderson
Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome,...
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Texting is an expansion of our linguistic repertoire
Last month I wrote about the dramatic, grammatic evolution of LOL, referring to two talks on texting by linguist John McWhorter in which he describes LOL’s shift from straightforward initialism...
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Link love: language (53)
To keep at bay the ever-present danger of running out of things to read on the internet, here’s a selection of language-related links I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks. For hardboiled hacks and editors:...
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New language blog: Caxton
Caxton is a new blog about language from Barrie England, an Oxford graduate who has studied English literature, foreign languages, and older varieties of English. It is named after printing pioneer...
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You can pronounce “GIF” any way you like
An impressively silly debate resumed this week over the “correct” pronunciation of GIF. Steve Wilhite, who invented the format, prefers “jif”, and at the recent Webby Awards he shared this opinion...
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The creole continuum
The much-loved “jive talk” scene from the comedy film Airplane! is an amusing if slightly improbable demonstration of how a single language – in this case English – can accommodate varieties so...
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Link love: language (54)
Another month means another selection of language and book links, the latest batch including tiny libraries and great secrets, badgers and Moo Fields, jive and wiki. Something for everyone, I hope....
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What’s the difference between envy and jealousy?
Jealousy and envy are in some ways interchangeable, in other ways not. Dictionary definitions overlap but differentiate the words differently. Coverage of their respective meanings is strangely absent...
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Folk etymology: from hiccup to hiccough
Folk etymology is when a word or phrase is changed – phonetically, orthographically, or both – to better fit a mistaken idea about its origin. It’s why some folk call a hiccup a hiccough: hic-cough may...
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Link love: language (55)
The number of subscribers to Sentence first has doubled in the last few months. If you’re new here, welcome, and if you’re a veteran reader, thanks for your endurance. The blog placed respectably in...
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Pronouns, humans, and dormice
The kinds of things relative pronouns refer to in modern English can be divided roughly as follows: that – things and people which – things, but not normally people who – normally people, not things,...
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