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The strange absence of ‘ambiguate’
If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax...
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Book review: Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self, by...
It’s a truism that language is integral to identity. So when our relationship with it changes, complications quickly accrue: Do we become someone different in another tongue? Is that all down to...
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Emoji reaction cards
Early in the pandemic, I used Zoom and other video-chat platforms like never before. For me it was mostly social, not work-related: a way to see and stay in touch with family and friends when I wasn’t...
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We ourself can use this pronoun
On a recent rewatch of the 1979 film The Warriors, I noticed an unusual pronoun spoken by Cleon, played by Dorsey Wright:* Ourself, once in regular use, is now scarce outside of certain dialects, and...
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How to accept language change, with David Cronenberg
Language change is something I watch closely, both as a copy-editor and as someone broadly interested in how we communicate. I read usage dictionaries for fun; I also read a lot of fiction, and...
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Link love: language (77)
Links, links, dozens of links! About language, linguistics, literature, and wordy stuff. Most are for reading, some () for listening. Literature clock. How we read emoji. The language of the hand....
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How slang catches on, survives, and fades: The schwa is never stressed? Ridiculous, says Geoff Lindsey: What America got wrong about Ebonics: How dialect coaches put the accent on performances:...
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Swearing like a trooper, a trucker, a sailor and . . . a starling?
At Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, I have a new post up about the idiom swear like a [X]. After seeing the phrase swear like a trooper (maybe in Beryl Bainbridge’s A Quiet Life), I...
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10 more words from Irish English dialect
One of my pet linguistic topics is Irish English dialect, which I explored at length in an essay a while back. Here are 10 words, usages, and grammatical features characteristic of English as it’s...
View ArticleSix more videos about language
The latest in an erratic series. In this set we have punctuation, phonetics, raciolinguistics, gesture, lexicography, and writing advice. Viewing length ranges from 4 minutes to 1 hour 18 minutes. A...
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Don’t never tell nobody not to use no double negatives
Sometimes what I read tells me what to write about. Other times the hints come from what I watch. This time it’s both. First I read a line in Richard Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions with this...
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A round-up of linguistic items – essays, news, blog posts, papers, and podcasts on language – for your enjoyment and diversion: Learning Na’vi. On plurals of hapax. Birds in English place names. A...
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Has ‘greenlit’ been greenlighted?
The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these...
View ArticleLink love: language (79)
A selection of topical language-related links for your reading (or listening) pleasure. I have cameos in a couple of them: I am not a typo. Linguistic capture errors. How robins got their name. The...
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