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 » Involuntary immigrants
Below is a guest post by Larry Horn, based on a note submitted to the American Dialect Society's mailing list. The topic is the the slaves-as-immigrants flap occasioned by Ben Carson’s reference in his recent remarks characterizing slaves as immigrants who worked particularly hard for particularly low wages. Given the opportunity to “walk back” his remarks a day or two … [Link]
Omniglot blog » Protagonists and sidekicks
When listening to The Allusionist podcast today I learnt an interesting word – tritagonist, who was the actor who played the third role in ancient Greek drama. Tritagonist comes from the Ancient Greek word τρίτἀγωνιστής (triagōnistḗs), from τρίτ (third) and ἀγωνιστής (combatant, participant). The actors who played the first and second roles in ancient Greek drama were known as the … [Link]
Language Log » Hate
There are multilingual signs all over Swarthmore (where I live) that say "Hate Has No Home Here". The signs are printed in six languages: English, Urdu, Hebrew, Korean, Arabic, and Spanish. I wondered about the choice of languages, but — with a little googling — I found that these are apparently the languages most commonly spoken at Petersen Elementary School … [Link]
Language Log » Mistakes
Yesterday's post "A stick with which to beat other women with" discussed the duplication of prepositions in the title phrase, and a commenter complained that The woman interviewed has a pretty mediocre command of English (she doesn't pronounce a single coherent sentence and keeps stuttering) although she is an actress speaking in her native language. That she would make mistakes … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » hater steak
Something you feed haters, has to be juicy lies that will get them to bite My haters where getting hungry so I fed them some hater steak!
[Link]
languagehat.com » E grādment.
A lucky dive into Google Books sent me back to the surface clutching a reference to a book I hadn’t known about but knew I had to read, A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos 
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