Blogs about Language

We all know when someone is listing something in a speech, but what is it about the intonation that tells us a list is happening? I had always thought there was a particular intonation contour …

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 …

From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy: (#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza …

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 …

A beverage so simple, and yet with such a complex and intriguing history, cultural presence, and plenty of health benefits. If you’re a tea lover, I think you’ll enjoy this post; but even if you’re …

Following on from my post about setting up my kids with a Raspberry Pi 400 as their first computer, here I share how I’ve made the system easy to manage remotely and how I imposed …

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: Son forse un poeta? No, certo. Non scrive che una parola, ben strana, la penna dell’anima mia: “follia”. Son dunque un pittore? Neanche. Non ha che un colore la tavolozza dell’anima mia: “malinconia”. …

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 …

David-Antoine Williams (see this 2022 post) wrote me thus: I thought I might pass along some recent work of mine on OED editions and revisions. The most recent is a short thing on antedating rates …

My, my, my!! Who'da thunk it? Japanese beef brand faces marketing mess as kanji creates confusion Japan Today (5/4/24) The government of Ibaraki Prefecture has hit a marketing snag in the promotion of its local …

Light, one-syllable girls’ names are having a moment. Long-neglected classics like June, Ruth and Mae and have made comebacks, but there simply aren’t enough of them to go around. So parents are turning to single-syllable …

In the U.S., most of the names given to baby girls end with a vowel sound. And many of the remaining names end with an N-sound. So, what about girl names that end with other …

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve put together a book based on this blog. I’m happy to announce that it has a publisher (Princeton University Press), a publication date (September in the U.S., November in …

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 …