Blogs about Language

In the anime “Chihayafuru,” a team of high schoolers plays a card game called ‘karuta’. It’s based around hearing a reader read a poem aloud, and then finding the card corresponding to that poem on …

dashboarddiaries:Every Tumblr user knows that we Tumblrinas use language a little differently. We’re not like other social media users. We’re weird. We’re weirdos. And this month, we have actual linguist Gretchen McCulloch (@allthingslinguistic) on to …

Just two days ago, it was (piecrust) crumblies. Now, Benita Bendon Campbell has sent me e-mail connecting crumblies to (garment) greeblies — which, as it turns out, I posted about on this blog way back …

Someone recently asked me if I had written about the root אמן. I thought for sure I had already, but it turned out I only mentioned it very briefly as a sidenote in this post:Jastrow …

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! Whether you’ve landed here by chance or through habit, I welcome you — and suggest that you follow me to where the action is now: on my Substack newsletter. The name is the same, …

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 …

One of the latest additions to my library is the Knox Version of the Bible, published by Baronius Press. In this unboxing post I’m going to present its features, starting with a brief explainer on …

A while back I read Bruno Latour’s After Lockdown, his last sole-authored book. It is beautiful and written with the poetic vision of someone whose world, whose Earth, whose Universe has come alive with relations, …

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: Quando avanza il febbraio, e ancor non ride Primavera, ma più non piange Inverno, ti trasfiguri; e l’ansia hai della zolla che si risveglia e riconosce il sole. Timido è il sole di …

In an episode of "Chadian Wisdom and Proverbs", Yaqub Muhammad Musa discusses three Mubi proverbs, providing the Mubi versions along with translation and extensive commentary in Arabic. Mubi is comparatively well-documented as East Chadic languages …

Margaret Talbot has a New Yorker review (archived) of Susannah Gibson’s “intelligent and engrossing” new book, The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement; the origin of the term is explained in this section: …

What word do you hear in this clip? Your browser does not support the audio element. If you heard "prison", you agree with me, and with Google's speech-to-text algorithm. But in fact the word is …

Why is this classic name so misunderstood? Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy Quick question: which of these names is not like the others? Molly, Elsie, Sadie, Lucy At first glance, the four make a …

Denílson de Oliveira Araújo The name Denilson emerged in the U.S. baby name data in 1997, saw a steep rise in usage in 1998, and reached peak popularity in 2002: 2003: 44 baby boys named …

When I saw in headlines that soccer/football commentator Gary Lineker had called England’s national team “shit” or “s—” (the two main variations I saw), I knew I had to find the exact wording. The quote …

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 …

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 endangered-language …

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought …