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
languagehat.com » A Justly Forgotten Poet.
Emily Bernhard Jackson begins her 2015 review of Emily Harrington’s Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Poets and the Bonds of Verse and Elizabeth Ludlow’s Christina Rossetti and the Bible with the refreshing sentence “There is, it should be admitted, such a thing as a justly forgotten poet.” I applaud the desire to rescue good writers who have fallen into obscurity, … [Link]
Language Log » Fecal Intensifiers
[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane, written on the evening of 3/24/17] At a friend’s dissertation defense this morning, a certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus, explaining the appeal of prosimetric vernacular literature to audiences in late imperial Shandong, noted that “people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.” This cracked the room up, naturally, but it also seemed … [Link]
Omniglot blog » Ave a butchers at er barnet
The title of this post is an example of Cockney, a form of speech you might hear in London, specifically in the Cheapside district of the City of London. It includes to bits of rhyming slang – butchers and barnet. Do you know, or can you guess what they mean? To (h)ave a butchers (the initial h is not used … [Link]
Language Log » "Watch the predicate"
From Jonathan Lundell: Can't think of anyone to ask but LL… what on earth does this mean? I know that Nunes's Monday testimony was coordinated with WH because top WH official told me, "Watch the predicate that is set" by Nunes. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) March 24, 2017 The word predicate here is clearly not the grammatical term, but rather … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » trump basket
A toilet bowl. -I drank way too much last night and ended up spending my night at the trump basket. -The trump basket is clogged; whoever used it last needs to plunge it.
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Language Log » Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye
You've probably heard sentences like this a thousand times: "Picture it in your mind's eye". How literally can we take that? "What Does it Mean to 'See With the Mind's Eye?'" (Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic [12/4/14]): Imagine the table where you've eaten the most meals. Form a mental picture of its size, texture, and color. Easy, right? But when you … [Link]
languagehat.com » The Greatest Book Deal Ever.
OK, that’s a little hyperbolic maybe, but the subject lends itself to hyperbole. Nina Martyris at the Paris Review writes about “of one of the riskiest—and shrewdest—deals in publishing history,” the one that brought us Les Misérables: In a new book, The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’ 
Language Log » Lingthusiasm
There's a wonderful new podcast on linguistic matters that I highly recommend to all Language Log readers. It's called Lingthusiasm, and it's appropriately billed as "a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics." The podcast is co-hosted by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. You may know Gretchen from her All Things Linguistic blog or her posts on The (dearly departed) Toast about … [Link]
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