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Link love: language (64)
A recurring series asks, ‘Will you still read me, will you still tweet me, when I’m sixty-four?’ I hope at least that you find a few items of interest in this batch of language-related links from...
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Link love: language (65)
It’s almost two months since my last batch of language links: definitely time for another. It’s a smaller pile than usual, and some of them are short. But if you’re still pressed for time, think of it...
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If Finnish is Godzilla, what creature is English?
This image has been floating around the internet for a while, but I don’t think I’ve seen it on a language blog. I don’t know who created it, but a search on TinEye suggests it originated on 9gag in...
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Six videos about language
Rather than wait for the next linkfest to share these videos about language – there’s no telling when that would happen – I thought I’d bundle them all together. Most are bite-sized. First up is Arika...
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How do you pronounce ‘eschew’?
Eschew ‘avoid, shun, refrain from’ is a formal word of Germanic origin that entered English via Old French in the 15thC. It’s not one I use often, still less speak aloud, but a brief exchange on...
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How gender-neutral is ‘guys’, you guys?
Guy has followed an improbable path from its origin as an eponym for Guy Fawkes to its common and versatile use today. It’s increasingly popular as a term to address mixed-gender and all-female groups,...
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English Dialect Dictionary Online
Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is a monumental work by any standard. Published in six volumes from 1898–1905, with detailed entries across 4505 double-columned pages, it’s all the...
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Otto Jespersen on language: ‘Everything is dynamic’
Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen appeared almost a century ago, in 1922. It has inevitably dated in some respects – e.g., occasional sexism and...
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Gender differences in conversational rituals
Here is a short clip of Deborah Tannen describing one way boys and girls express themselves differently: She says boys tend to use language to establish status and negotiate their place in a hierarchy,...
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Strong Language: The return of the ***king
It’s over a year since I blogged about Strong Language. Time to recap. For the uninitiated, Strong Language is a group blog about swearing – the linguistics and culture of taboo language – set up by...
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Pelecanos: the words, the rhythms, the slang
I’m slowly catching up on the back catalogue of George Pelecanos, who has written about 20 crime fiction novels (and also wrote for The Wire). Recently I read Hell to Pay (2002), which contains several...
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Link love: language (67)
A selection of items and bite ’ems of linguistic interest found around the internet in recent weeks. Some are short, some long; all are good, or at any rate interesting. Three are from The Toast,...
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Book review: Abby Kaplan: ‘Women Talk More than Men: And Other Myths about...
Humans are highly prone to cognitive bias. We habitually make bad judgements and draw unreasonable inferences from the available facts. These tendencies lead to many myths that persist in popular...
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Language acquisition and the ‘wild child’ Genie
An area of language acquisition that has attracted considerable scholarly (and lay) interest is the so-called critical period hypothesis. This proposes a critical period in childhood during which...
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The Wug-Plant
‘Precious Artifact’ is a short story by Philip K. Dick that I read recently in the collection The Golden Man (Methuen, 1981). I won’t get into the story here, or the book, except to lend context to a...
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Link love: language (68)
Before the year runs away from me – it’s about to sprint out of sight – I want to catch up here on the links I’ve been gathering (and in some cases tweeting) over the last few weeks. It’s the usual mix...
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Book spine poem #39: Language, Language!
My latest piece of doggerel in book-spine form has an obvious theme. * Language, Language! Language, language! The story of language. Language, slanguage Spoken here: a history of Language, a history...
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Lingthusiasm: a new podcast about linguistics
Two of my favourite linguabloggers, Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo and Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic, have teamed up to create a podcast called Lingthusiasm – so named because they’re...
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Kinship terms around the world
It’s often assumed that when babies say mama or papa (or similar) they are addressing or referring to their mother or father explicitly. Not so. In a 2012 post on mama/papa words around the world, I...
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The Language Hoax: John McWhorter on linguistic relativity
Linguist, professor, and author John McWhorter has featured on Sentence first a few times before, in posts about texting, creoles, dialects, linguistic complexity, and book spine poems. He has written...
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