Monthly Archives: December 2017

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The Boy From the Isle of Man

quirk

Randolph Quirk

One sign that your future may lie in linguistics is having a serious interest both in languages and in scientific analysis of structure (chemical or mathematical, for example). Such a conflict confronted a farm boy from the Isle of Man in 1945. Five years’ service in the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force had given him an intellectual interest in the science of explosives, and he had enrolled in a course in chemistry. But he also wanted to resume the degree course in English th…

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‘Click Here to Unsubscribe’

Amanda
It’s the fine print on too many of the unsolicited emails I receive, buried in the bottom of the layout. “Unsubscribe here.” “We value your time. If you are receiving this message in error, click here to unsubscribe from our list.”  “Didn’t sign up for this mailing?” And my favorite, “Update your preferences.”

Ah, my preferences.

Was it really so long ago that we became overwhelmed with subscriptions? In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield, a homemaker without a companion, plugs away trying t…

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Vulnerable Words and the CDC

Banned words
Rumor has it that the Trump administration has handed the Centers for Disease Control a list of seven “dirty words” that it should scrub from official documents being prepared for next year’s budget. Before we get to the words themselves — and isn’t seven a magic number? Seven dwarves, seven days, seven heavens, seven colors in the rainbow  — let’s pause for a moment to consider the plausibility of such a rumor in our country today.

When we think not just of censorship, but of actual, specific …

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It’s the Wine Talking

redwine

This is the season for eating out, perhaps slightly more than one should, and even allowing oneself a small glass of wine during an end-of-fall-semester three-course lunch.

The descriptions on wine lists, couched in language that is vaguely tempting yet simultaneously baffling, are presumably intended to help us make a decision to indulge. James Thurber satirized the genre in 1944 with a justly famous cartoon caption, a dinner host telling his guests, “It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without an…

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Utah: Talk Like a Native

Utah
Two weeks from now, hundreds of linguists will convene in Salt Lake City for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and affiliated groups like the American Dialect Society, the American Name Society, and others. It’s the big meeting of the year for experts in the study of language, including the next generation of would-be experts, who are now graduate students imbibing (or challenging) the wisdom of their elders.

If you’re a linguist, you don’t want to miss this opportunity to…

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What Is This ‘Even’?

even
When I last addressed the word even, in 2013, it had already migrated from its accustomed function as an adverb in such sentences as “I can’t even move this suitcase, much less pick it up” or “Even vegetarians sometimes have a hankering for bacon.” The Oxford English Dictionary elegantly gives this traditional meaning as:

Intimating that the sentence expresses an extreme case of a more general proposition implied (=French même). Prefixed … to the particular word, phrase, or clause, on which …

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The Fine Line Between Errors and Dialect Differences

hadve

“Imagine if I hadn’t of been there!” said someone in an email to my brother, Richard. He regarded the sentence coldly, as if it were a slimy creature emerging from under a rock. What’s that of ? A misspelled extra have ? Why? Doesn’t had suffice? He turned to the grammarian in the family, and asked me what had gone wrong.

It’s an interesting puzzle that teaches us something about drawing the subtle distinction between intralinguistic slips and interlinguistic variation.

Let’s start by setting a…

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‘False News’ Is Safer Than ‘Fake’

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As pundits agree, backed by none less than Potus himself, ours is the Era of Fake News. With so many political candidates for 2017 Word of the Year, fake news (or just plain fake, as in fake media), remains among the most likely.

Of course, since Potus wasn’t named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, but rather his sworn adversaries, the army of #MeToo “silence breakers” were, fake news might conjure up opposition rather than take the prize on January 5, when members and friends of the American…

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Splendor in the Tall Grass

long grass
Knowing my interest in British words and expressions crossing to the United States, Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, tweeted me a quote from a November 30 New York Times article about a potential state visit of Donald Trump to Britain: “Even before the latest uproar, there was speculation that the state visit was being pushed into the long grass.” She commented, “First time I recall seeing this BrE soccer metaphor (it’s usually ‘kick’) …

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Suspicion, Italian Style

Italy_color The New York Times reports on the currency of a new Italian term, dietrologia.

From the Italian dietro, meaning “behind,” the word points to a longstanding Italian predilection not to believe what one is being shown or told. There’s always something behind it, another door to another room where another truth is being concealed (and very possibly yet another door).

This Fellini-meets-Kafka attitude feels a bit different from the authoritarian doublespeak of Orwell and the spy-vs.-spy lingo of Jo…

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