Blogs about Language

The "Oldie but goodie" soft rock/pop/middle-of-the-road band "Carpenters" seems to have been tinged by nostalgia since it began. Active from 1969 to 1983, the band was fronted by Karen Carpenter, a singer with a contralto …

Bonus 71: Parrots, art, and what even is a word - Deleted scenes from Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe interviews: lingthusiasm:Bonus 71: Parrots, art, and what even is a word - Deleted scenes …

What is the origin of the Talmudic word דְּיוֹקָן deyokan? In rabbinic literature it meant "image, likeness", and today, in modern Hebrew, means "portrait, profile."Steinsaltz provides two theories:The origin of this word is not entirely …

With monkeypox in the news, some people are encountering the phrase “men who have sex with men” (“MSM” for short) for the first time. I’ve even seen some hot takes positing that it’s a new …

A while ago I posted a lengthy grammar article about the conditional sentences in English, and in this post we’ll read a poem by Rudyard Kipling that can be used to illustrate conditional clauses. It …

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt, impf. ti-dubu-t). There are no compelling cognates for this in Berber outside Tuareg, as Naït-Zerrad's comparative dictionary confirms; at best, one might …

A couple of years ago I posted about Paul Anthony Jones and his online avatar HaggardHawks; now I learn from Lynne Murphy’s TLS review that he’s written what sounds like a useful book: Those who …

From the Facebook account of Mei Han: The Chinese characters say: wǔ lù cáishén 五路財神 The Gods of Wealth of the Five Directions (North, South, East, West, and Center) are often invoked during the Chinese …

Apologies for the long gap in posting — I have been in Melbourne, Australia, leading a study abroad program for the University of Delaware, and pondering whether the preferred spelling is “brekky” or “brekkie.” The …

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 …

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 brief history of the …

Yesterday, I declared the UK-to-US SbaCL Word of the Year. You can read about it here. The US-to-UK one may be as controversial as it was the first time (a)round (in May). But here goes: …

On Mastodon (or rather, on fediscience.org, a server powered by Mastodon), Marc Schulder asks: What do you call the list of teaser phrases at chapter beginnings in novels like “Three Men in a Boat” or …

If you’ve been seeing or hearing enshittify or enshittification in the last week or so, you have one man to thank: Cory Doctorow, the journalist, sci-fi writer, and co-author of the new book Chokepoint Capitalism: …

Wordplay to keep the world at bay We are halfway through January now. The Holibobs are over and we have come to the end of Chrimbo Limbo – that uncertain period between Christmas and New …