Almost everyone uses language, so inevitably almost everyone thinks they are an expert in it. I don’t consider myself an expert, though most of my work requires at least language competence and sometimes actual skill, but I do follow the blogs featured on this feeds page.
(If you are wondering where the translation-related feeds have all gone, I have put them on their own page.)
Most of the blogs represented here are in English, most of the time, but don’t be surprised to find other languages used. Go with the flow – I occasionally find myself pleasantly surprised at how much I can grasp in languages I have never seen before.
Language On the Net
Language Log » Sandra Bland: Talking While Black
Below is a guest post by Nicole Holliday, Rachel Burdin, and Joseph Tyler: 
Sandra Bland’s traffic stop and the tragic series of events that occurred afterwards have been the subject of many recent think pieces, but few authors have examined why the initial traffic stop went wrong in the first place. The most obvious explanation might be simple racial profiling, which … [Link]
Language Log » From Alphabet to Google
Google has picked "Alphabet" as the name for its new parent company: "‘Alphabet,’ From Ancient Greece to Google", by Ben Zimmer, in Word on the Street, Wall Street Journal (8/13/15) I think it's a brilliant choice, and our colleague Ben has done a good job of explaining why. [h.t. June Teufel Dreyer] [Link]
Language Log » Free souvenirs
From Randy Alexander in Xiamen / Amoy, Fujian / Hok-kiàn, China: Saw this on my trail run today and got a laugh. It's easy to see how this came about — verbs get translated with "to" mindlessly stuck in front of them. 
Here's what the Chinese on the sign says: xiǎoxīn zhuìluò 小心坠落 ("be careful [not] to fall", i.e., Danger! … [Link]
Language Log » Printing error on a Chinese lunch delivery bag
Eric Pelzl sent in this photograph of a bag from a lunch delivery that contains an interesting printing error: 
The Chinese characters on the bag read: zhēn'ài dìqiú bǎohù huánjìng 珍爱地球 保护环境 ("treasure the earth, protect the environment") The Pinyin reads thus: zhēn'ài dìqiú bǎohù jiāyuán 珍爱地球 保护家園 ("Treasure the earth, protect your home") So we find a discrepancy in … [Link]
Language Log » "Linguists have a name for this kind of analysis"
Gordon Smith is enthusiastic about a recent opinion of the Utah Supreme Court, as he explains in "Corpus Linguistics in the Courts (Again)", The Conglomerate 8/14/2015: Yes, yes, yes! The point at issue is important and ubiquitous in legal argumentation, and his blog post explains the reasons for his (well justified) enthusiasm at least as well as I could. So … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » Netflix and Chill
It means that you are going to go over to your partners house and fuck with Netflix in the background. "Yeah we just watched Netflix and chilled." "Damn nigga how deep?" "Four knuckles deep"
[Link]
languagehat.com » Dictionary of Comics Onomatopoeia.
Well, there isn’t one. But there should be! That’s the conclusion of this Izvestia story (by Evgenia Korobkova — thanks, Sashura!), which is so wonderful it’s worth stumbling through it via Google Translate if you don’t read Russian. It starts off talking about how translators usually just transliterate English onomatopoeia: “beng,” “kresh,” “bems,” “vaw,” and so forth. Then comes the … [Link]
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