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Link love: language (69)
As usual I’ve left it late to do a linkfest, so I have a bumper crop of 50 language links for you this month. There are more podcasts than usual, so you can spare your eyes and treat your ears between...
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The linguistics of colour names
The news website Vox has produced some good videos on linguistic topics, which can be found amidst their many other clips. Its latest one looks at the vexed question of colour names and categories in...
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Uptalk in Surrey: The Twinning Hypothesis
Uptalk, also called upspeak, rising intonation, and (misleadingly) high-rising terminal, is where someone ends a statement as though it were a question? These two are for illustration? Uptalk is...
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Linguistic sci-fi in Embassytown
The sun still rose, and the shops sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe. —China Miéville, Embassytown Science fiction offers endless scope for linguistic experimentation, and...
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A to Z of English usage myths
English usage lore is full of myths and hobgoblins. Some have the status of zombie rules, heeded by millions despite being bogus and illegitimate since forever (split infinitives,...
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Link love: language (70)
For your reading, listening, and viewing pleasure, here are some language-related links that have caught my eye in recent weeks, or rather months – it has been ages since I did a linkfest. If you want...
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English is not pure or in peril
On Twitter yesterday, Bryan Garner shared a quote by Arthur Schlesinger on language usage that I hadn’t come across before; it seems to be from Schlesinger’s 1974 essay ‘Politics and the American...
View ArticleGender-neutral language in the workplace
I wrote an article on the importance of gender-neutral language in the workplace for UK job-board company Totaljobs. The article considers work-language in a cultural context and the harmful effects of...
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Linguistic contagion and detox
Sludge: the word’s connotations range from unsavoury to downright toxic, radioactive. But we produce a huge amount of it (multiple shit-tons, you might say), and we have to deal with that. And so we...
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Buffaloed by the verb buffalo
On a recent mini-binge of James M. Cain novels, I finished a 5-in-1 set from Picador: two I’d read years ago – The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity – and three others I soon raced through:...
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Verbing and nouning are fine and here’s a quiz
If verbing weirds language, nouning is its weirdification. — Stan Carey (@StanCarey) April 11, 2013 New words enter English in a variety of ways. They may be imported (import); compounded (download);...
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The Speech Community
I recently enjoyed Language and Social Context: Selected Readings (Penguin, 1972), edited by Pier Paolo Giglioli. It includes some articles so famous that even a non-linguist like me knew them (John...
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‘Like’ is an infix now, which is un-like-believably innovative
Like has undergone radical developments in modern English. It can function as a hedge (‘I’ll be there in like an hour’), a discourse particle (‘This like serves a pragmatic function’), and a sentence...
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Talk with your mouth full: the literary game of mouth-filled speech
In 2011 a reader wrote to linguist David Crystal with an interesting question. Having tried recently to brush their teeth and talk at the same time, they wondered how such ‘approximations of real...
View ArticleLink love: language (71)
It’s past time for a linkfest, so here’s a selection of items from the world of language and linguistics that caught my eye in recent months. Normally I include some audio material, but I’ll save that...
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Why do we stand on our tiptoes and not our toetips?
Compounds are everywhere in English vocabulary, formed by combining two or more independent elements (‘free morphemes’, in linguistic jargon). They can be nouns (living room), verbs (download),...
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Misnegation should not be overestimated, I mean underestimated
Misnegation is an obscure word for a common phenomenon. You won’t find it in dictionaries, but you can probably figure out that it means some kind of ‘incorrect negation’ – not to be confused with...
View ArticleLink love: language (72)
Happy new year to readers and visitors of Sentence first (which, I just noticed, turned ten last year). If you’re into language or linguistics, you should find a few things to interest you below. Don’t...
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The Irish diminutive suffix -een
In A Brilliant Void, a new anthology of vintage Irish science fiction edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018), I saw some examples of a grammatical feature I’ve been meaning to write about: the...
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Mizzled by misles
The first time you saw the word biopic, did you pronounce it ‘bi-OPic’, to rhyme with myopic, either aloud or in your head, before learning that it’s ‘bio-pic’, as in biographical picture? If so, you...
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