Language Log: X-iversaries everywhere
Here are two anniversarial tweets that appeared Friday evening. The first is from the WhiteHouse.gov Technology account, celebrating the anniversary of the release of the source code for We the...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Getting worked up over "twerk"
Perfect lexicographical storms don't come along like this very often. On Sunday night, Miley Cyrus egregiously "twerked" at MTV's Video Music Awards, in a performance that quickly became National...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Language Log partners with Lexicon Valley on Slate
For the past year and a half, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield have been co-hosting the excellent Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, covering many Language Log-friendly topics (and interviewing a few Language...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Colorless milk ports flap furiously
On the Wall Street Journal's Emerging Europe blog, Emre Peker reports on a case of linguistic chicanery, with none other than Noam Chomsky as its victim. Coming from Noam Chomsky, the following...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Did Stalin really coin "American exceptionalism"?
The phrase "American exceptionalism" has been much in the news ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an op/ed piece in the New York Times taking issue with President Obama's statement that...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Stanford remembers Ivan Sag
As reported earlier this month by Arnold Zwicky, the world of linguistics lost Ivan Sag after a three-year fight against cancer. Now Corrie Goldman of The Humanities at Stanford provides a more...
View ArticleLanguage Log: "Schwa Fire" ventures into long-form language journalism
For several years now, many linguists and their fellow travelers have talked about the need for a magazine about language issues that could capture the public attention. Mark Liberman has beaten the...
View ArticleLanguage Log: The return of Batman bin Suparman
Back in 2008, an image got passed around the blogosphere showing the Singaporean identity card of one Batman bin Suparman. I broke down the name in a Language Log post (my first after the great LL...
View ArticleLanguage Log: A fair-use victory for Google in these United States
US Circuit Judge Denny Chin has ruled in favor of Google in its long-running copyright litigation with the Authors Guild over the scanning and digitization of books. Chin ruled that the Google Books...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Can "[adjective]-ass" occur predicatively?
One of the highlights of this weekend's Saturday Night Live was a "Weekend Update" appearance by Taran Killam playing Jebidiah Atkinson, a 19th-century speech critic. (Apologies to those outside of...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Dialect chat on MSNBC
The interactive dialect quiz on the New York Times website, developed by Josh Katz from Bert Vaux and Scott Golder's Harvard Dialect Survey, has proved to be immensely popular. It's been a viral...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Lumpatious lexicography
In the latest episode of "Sam & Cat," a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, the plot takes a lexicographical turn. As Nickelodeon describes it, Sam and Cat make a bet with the annoying older brother of a...
View ArticleLanguage Log: "Because" with non-verbal complement
The American Dialect Society's recognition of because as Word of the Year has sparked a number of intriguing linguistic arguments. In its innovative use, because can take various different parts of...
View ArticleLanguage Log: A zeugmatic crash blossom to torment Mets fans
As if New York Mets fans don't have to suffer enough, what with the five straight losing seasons and the embarrassing bullpen meltdown in yesterday's home opener, this headline (tweeted by Mark...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Emojify the Web: "the next phase of linguistic evolution"
Today's announcement from the Google Chrome team (yes, note the date): The commentary from "Hannah Beecher, Ph.D., Linguistic Pragmatics" is a nice touch. But beyond the April Fool's lolz, I'd argue...
View ArticleLanguage Log: James Higginbotham, 1941-2014
James Higginbotham, professor of philosophy and linguistics at USC, died on Friday at the age of 72. USC News details his professional career, which straddled the disciplinary boundary between...
View ArticleLanguage Log: "Ustam" + "k" = 10 months in jail
In Turkey, outspoken newspaper columnist Önder Aytaç has received a 10-month jail sentence over an errant "k" on Twitter. Here is how the situation is explained in Zeynep Tufekci's widely cited Medium...
View ArticleLanguage Log: No "linguistics" on Indiana license plates
In Indiana, a police officer successfully sued the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for the right to have a vanity license plate reading "0INK." According to the lawsuit, the message on the officer's license...
View ArticleLanguage Log: PangramTweets
The Twitter API, beyond its great utility for corpus linguistics (see "On the front lines of Twitter linguistics," "The he's and she's of Twitter"), has made possible a lot of fun automated...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Paul is dead
From Ajam Media Collective's Facebook page, a surprising buffet sign at Erbil International Hotel in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan: The Facebook post explains: A buffet sign reads "ميت بول"...
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