Blogs about Language

Things are, hopefully, looking a little better. Some lessons learned from the past year are to not take on very large projects, as cool as they would be. I recently began reading "Language vs Reality" …

official-linguistics-post:dedalvs:jv:council-of-beetroot:People should use this text embellishment more𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟Holy shit this is unicode???𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 …

I haven’t been coping well with daily life for a while now, but see no reason to issue fresh bulletins on my anxieties, incapacities, and infirmities in these difficult times, so I’ve been posting on …

After a soldier enlists in the Israeli army, there are two words to describe him (or her, although I'm providing the male forms of the words): טִירוֹן tiron - "new recruit" and טוּרַאי turai - …

I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by …

Hello, and welcome to Old Fritinancy — Classic Fritinancy? — the blog I launched in 2006. In August 2023 I made the transition to the Substack platform, where I’m publishing new writing on names, brands, …

1. Academic rumours Careful scholarship is supposed to protect us from chains of whispers, where texts get distorted via paraphrase and summary so that secondary and tertiary works fail to accurately convey the sense of …

Published by Thomas Nelson, this commentary is not designed to be neutral: its target audience is pretty narrow and specific, and the theological framework behind its scholarship precisely defined.

Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature, writes: To liken the mountain to a man and talk of its “humor” or “rage” does little harm. But to liken the man to the mountain proposes that all …

Start with something simple. We've got the verb give, which we all know, and the thing that you give is a gift. They're quite obviously related. This is Not Interesting.Then you've got people who use …

The original: Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende. Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì …

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer, freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have …

In Anna Wiener’s New Yorker piece “How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated?” (archived), there is a mention of “the I’on Swamp, a former rice paddy on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina”; thanks to the …

This is a recent instagram post of the Vietnamese singer Suni Ha Linh. View this post on Instagram A post shared by SUNI (@sunihalinh) The translation is accurate. búbèi dìngyì de huā 不被定义的花 "undefined flower(s) …

A major economic study found that employers respond differently to resumes with “Black” and “White” names. But which names, exactly? A closer look raises questions. Names send messages, and we can’t help receiving them. We …

Flag of the United Kingdom Last year, the country of Scotland — which covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain — welcomed nearly 46,000 babies. What were the most popular names among …

One of the first posts I did for this blog was on the expression “the run-up to,” meaning a preliminary period. It was a really short post, as was my custom in those days, so …

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the …

‘Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot) Banjaxed and bockety are a fun pair of words in the Irish English vernacular. Banjaxed I heard from …

Inspired by Anatoly Liberman's Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (which I've reviewed for the International Journal of Lexicography), here's a quick dip into some ways of saying one's going to …