John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons

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Language Stuff

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 » Courtesy and personal pronoun choice

Wednesday 6 December 17:12:10 UTC 2017

My most recent post started out as a very minor note of approval about the continuing spread of singular they in journalism. Then the person who sent me the quote realized that Phillip Garcia, named in the cited newspaper story, had a preference for being referred to with the pronoun they, which nullified the point. So I modified the post … [Link]

Language Log » Participle, preposition, whatever

Wednesday 6 December 14:37:46 UTC 2017

A political cartoon reacting to the discussion of who wrote one of Donald Trump's tweets: Another John, John Dryden, gets blamed for the original "zombie rule" about no-clause-final-prepositions — see "Hot Dryden-on-Johnson action" 5/1/2007, or "'Latin-obsessed 17th century introverts'?", 8/26/2010. But it seems that the cartoonist, Jack Ohman, takes the rap for substituting participle for preposition in this cartoon's caption. … [Link]

Language Log » Morphological creativity: Shoedrobe

Wednesday 6 December 11:38:04 UTC 2017

Forwarded by Alex Baumans, an email advertisement from Legend Footwear in London — "RESTOCK YOUR SHOEDROBE FOR WINTER!" Alex asks: Shoedrobe? How did that formation come about? Are there other -drobes out there? There are certainly plenty of other shoedrobes out there, including a twitter hashtag, an instagram hashtag, and quite a few news-ish quasi-advertisements, e.g. "Shoe-drobe Envy: Kylie Jenner"; … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Boonk

Wednesday 6 December 8:30:00 UTC 2017

The act of finessing someone of their personal belongings; The attempt to purchase an item, but deciding to run away without paying for the item; "Oh my goodness! I just got boonked by that man!""Tonight, we are going to boonk the corner store.""BOONK GANG!!!" [Link]

Language Log » Belgian whistles

Wednesday 6 December 7:49:41 UTC 2017

Heard a guy talking about Belgian whistles. "A basic website costs 10k, or 25k upwards if you want all the Belgian whistles," he said. Belgian whistles. — C:temp (@BryceElder) December 5, 2017 This one isn't in the Eggcorn Database, and doesn't seem to be mentioned in the forum either. [But googling the phrase is not recommended…] There are a few … [Link]

Language Log » If you can't say something nice…

Wednesday 6 December 1:45:19 UTC 2017

This is a guest post by Kirby Conrod. I'm sorry to see that the venerable Geoff Pullum is so desperately behind the times. I don't mean to be snarky, I genuinely am sad about it. It's not just a matter of being un-hip to the cool new language change in progress (singular "they" is making inroads syntactically in the types … [Link]

languagehat.com » Lake Chad.

Wednesday 6 December 1:00:24 UTC 2017

I’m finally bracing myself to read Ben Taub’s New Yorker essay “Lake Chad: The World’s Most Complex Humanitarian Disaster” (that’s the online title — in the physical magazine it’s called “The Emergency”), but I was stopped cold and forced to post by the opening: Chad was named for a mistake. In the eighteen-hundreds, European explorers arrived at the marshy banks … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Sitting in a session

Wednesday 6 December 0:12:07 UTC 2017

If someone said to you, “It was a good session last night”, what would you understand by that? In my world a session involves people gathering together, usually in a pub, to play folk music, sing, and sometimes to dance and/or tell stories. Other kinds of sessions are available: jam sessions, parliamentary sessions, training sessions, drinking sessions, recording sessions, and … [Link]

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