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 » Me So Hungry
Do Victor's posts stoke your appetite for fine foods? Feast on these: 
Thematically related: 
As always, a cross-linguistic perspective is required to uncover deeper generalizations: 
Hmmm, not in my experience, no. (Provenance guarantee: all images taken or clipped by me, non-Photoshopped.) [Link]
Language Log » Vegetable students
From Simon Martin: 
Simon writes: I suspect the product shown in the above picture is aimed at time/money poor students, but it is all too easy for my anglosaxon eye to read it as implying that it contains vegetable based students. The product inside that grandiloquently worded package is the humble Sichuan pickled mustard green stem. Here's Wikipedia on the … [Link]
Language Log » Listening, speaking, dissing, and writing
The four main aspects of learning a language are "tīng shuō dú xiě 听说读写 (simplified) / 聽說讀寫 (traditional) ("listening, speaking, reading, and writing"). A few days ago in Singapore, an event was held to promote Mandarin in accordance with this fourfold approach. Unfortunately, at the launch of the campaign on July 10, 2017, on the front of the large podium … [Link]
Language Log » Analogous spaces
Today's xkcd: 
Mouseover title: "If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis." [The ICP reference, if you don't get it…] For Linguistics, the x-axis might be labelled "How difficult it is to frame the question in a scientifically coherent way" ("Difficulty" for short), and the upper right corner (the "danger zone") … [Link]
Language Log » Elephant semifics
Smut Clyde at Riddled continues to generate Google Translate poetry: 
The whole thing is good, but I especially like this stanza: Asleep Asleep Muddy asleep Inevulatory seeds Semi-frail Semi-dumpling Inevulatory breadth Inevulatory as a crown Inevulatory as a crowd Inevuligible as a crown. A crown of cowpea A crowded crowd. The input: variable-length sequences of the Japanese hiragana character "nu" … [Link]
Language Log » Do STT systems have "intriguing properties"?
In "Intriguing properties of neural networks" (2013), Christian Szegedy et al. point out that … deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extent. We can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain imperceptible perturbation… For example: 
There has been quite a bit of discussion of the topic since then. In … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » Side Daddy
When someone has a sugar daddy and they have a side sugar daddy to get more money. "Britany, my side daddy just bought me a new purse."
[Link]
languagehat.com » The Potent Prince o’ Ballatrie.
I’ve always had a weakness for Scots poetry (one of my favorite poets is Hugh MacDiarmid, about whom I’ve done a number of posts: 2002, 2011, 2013), and Patrick Crotty’s TLS appreciation of the Scottish poet Sydney Goodsir Smith has made me add Smith’s Collected Poems to my wishlist. According to Crotty, Smith’s masterpiece is the 1948 collection Under the … [Link]
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