John Gordon Ross

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

Omniglot blog » Going to the circus

Thursday 25 January 17:34:22 UTC 2018

Last week I went to the circus. It wasn’t a traditional circus in a big top with animals and clowns, but the wonderful Pirates of the Carabina with their Relentless Unstoppable Human Machine in the theatre in the local arts centre. I also saw the film The Greatest Showman, a film based loosely on the life of P.T. Barnum. I … [Link]

Language Log » Poetic dynamism

Thursday 25 January 11:17:30 UTC 2018

Well, the dynamic range of the amplitude of syllables in poetry readings, anyhow: What IS that? In the course of a discussion of other matters, Charles Bernstein asked about measuring and visualizing a poetry reader's variation in amplitude. As I understand it, he has the intuition that some readers are relatively uniform in their presentation, while others are more varied. … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Have a Presidential Dinner

Thursday 25 January 8:30:00 UTC 2018

Taking fast food home and eating it in bed before going to sleep. Taken from reports in the Fire and the Fury that Donald Trump often goes to bed early with a cheeseburger I was tired out, so I decided to just go by the drive thru on the way home and have a presidential dinner. [Link]

languagehat.com » How Many Is a Couple?

Thursday 25 January 3:05:22 UTC 2018

Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca discusses an interesting phenomenon. To her, as to me, “a couple of” basically means two, but she had a revelation: While discussing language peeves in my introductory English linguistics course, one student, Katelyn Carroll, volunteered that it drove her nuts when people used the phrase a couple (of) to refer to more than two things. … [Link]

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