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More clichéd than previously thought
A lesser known cliché in journalism, especially science reporting, is the construction than previously thought. It doesn’t always take that precise form – sometimes it’s than originally thought, or...
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Link love: language (56)
It’s been a month, more or less, since my last set of language links. Here’s the latest batch of articles and videos I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks, or unearthed from further back: * Glossologics, a very...
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And I’m like, Quotative ‘like’ isn’t just for quoting
A few tweets from earlier today, to introduce and summarise the topic: Critics of quotative "like" ("I was like" ≈ "I said") aren't looking closely enough at the phenomenon. It's not a lazy or trivial...
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The referee itself
In Barry Blaustein’s wrestling documentary Beyond the Mat, then-WWF supremo Vince McMahon has just given Darren Drozdov his new character name, Puke, and is explaining how he’ll be introduced to the...
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Four blogs on language and linguistics
Today I want to briefly mention* four language/linguistics blogs that deserve your attention and might not have broached your radar. Actually I linked to Glossologics lately, but there’s lots of new...
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Scottish words for snow
I’ll assume readers know that the “Eskimos have X words for snow” idea is essentially a myth and a hackneyed journalistic trope. So I won’t elaborate on it here, except to note that the claim is so...
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Book Review: The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics
Every serious field of study deserves a satirical wing, and linguistics is blessed in this regard with Speculative Grammarian, a journal some say is now centuries old. SpecGram, as it’s known to fan...
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Link love: language (57)
Here’s my pick of language links from the past few weeks. I’m overdue, so this is a bigger batch than usual. Some I’ve already tweeted. Enjoy! A silent alphabet. When books were shelved backwards....
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Book spine poem: a language evolution special
Someone once told me it was harder to make a book spine poem, aka bookmash, from non-fiction titles. I don’t know; I hadn’t really thought about it before, and I’m never conscious of it when...
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Language change and the arbitrariness of the sign
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) devised a model of linguistic meaning involving what he called the signifier (a symbolic or phonological form) and what it signifies. Their association...
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Mergers and minimal pairs: a survey of accents
Warren Maguire, a linguist lecturing at the University of Edinburgh, has told me about a survey he’s conducting into accents of English in Britain and Ireland. It’s been running for a few years, and...
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Wikitongues: documenting the world’s languages
Wikitongues has been on the go since 2012, but I heard about it just recently. It’s a project aimed at documenting linguistic diversity and exploring identity, in the form of short videos of people...
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Ghostly fetches and dialect features
This should have gone out at Halloween, but anyway. Based on my regard for Daniel Woodrell I was given a copy of The Cove by Ron Rash, and the recommendation was fully justified: the story is...
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‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar
If the title of this post made perfect sense to you, then you’re way ahead of me. But just in case, we’d best recap. Neal Whitman wrote a good article at Grammar Girl recently on the possible origins...
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An aitch or a haitch? Let’s ’ear it.
The oddly named letter H is usually pronounced “aitch” /eɪtʃ/ in British English, but in Ireland we tend to aspirate it as “haitch” /heɪtʃ/. In my biology years I would always have said “a HLA marker”,...
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Slang bans and aphaeresis
I’ve a couple of new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. First, ’Scuse me, squire – ’tis just aphaeresis gives a brief account of the linguistic phenomenon known as aphaeresis or apheresis, which...
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Curmudgeonly metonymy
Over at Macmillan Dictionary Blog I have a couple of new posts to share. First up, The grumbling heart of ‘curmudgeon’ looks at a much-loved and quite mysterious word: It’s a fine word, curmudgeon, a...
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‘Because’ is the 2013 Word of the Year, because woo! Such win
Here’s a fun bit of news. In Minneapolis last night the American Dialect Society (ADS) declared because its Word of the Year 2013. Going up against topical heavyweights like selfie, Bitcoin, Obamacare,...
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Introducing Indo-European Jones
It started on Twitter, as these things often do. I read a comment about linguists and lexicographers being to language “what grave robbers are to archeology” (the context: hatred of the newly popular...
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The unsung value of singular ‘themself’
I’ve written before about the reflexive pronoun themself, showing its history in English and potential to fill a semantic gap in the language. Once a normal, unremarkable word, themself became less...
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