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Spit That Image Out
Quickly, now, without checking any dictionaries or usage guides: which of the following expressions is original, standard usage? Once and awhile Set and stone Try and get Spit and image All and all...
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Silence in the Mind’s Ear
“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is...
View ArticleA Trinity of Languages
Banja Luka, Bosnia — Here in the administrative entity known as the Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled part of the country properly called Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina, abbreviated...
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Who Says Tomato?
I’ve just wasted a perfectly good morning scrolling through my own pronunciative history. Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has produced a series of...
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Hobson-Jobson, Definitively
Col. Sir Henry Yule, colonial lexicographer As my recent posts have reflected, I’m still basking in the afterglow of the meeting last month of the Dictionary Society of North America, a gathering of...
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Ah, Louisville!
If you want to know how Americans speak, the go-to source is the quarterly journal American Speech, published by Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society. It’s a scholarly journal,...
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Language Mindset List for the Class of 2017
Each year at around this time, the folks at Beloit College put out the “Mindset List,” a half-serious, half-facetious accounting of what incoming first-year students do and do not know. It is...
View ArticleCounting the Languages of the World
I wrote recently from Bosnia and Herzegovina about the curious practice of taking a unitary language and trying to find ways of representing it as several different languages for political reasons, in...
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From Netherlandic-German to Multilingual Sardinia
Darryl Myers offers a rich and interesting comment on my Lingua Franca post last Thursday, observing that German is a interesting case to look at. It is indeed. Splitters (those who incline toward...
View ArticleWhy We Speak
Sometimes you wonder if that whole language thing might not have been the best idea. I’m referring not to when people say “Best. [Blank.] Ever.” or misuse literally, but to when they use words to...
View ArticleNo Synonyms, Please
Today’s quiz: What’s the difference between a bag and a sack? (Spoiler alert: Before you read further, what’s your answer to that question?) All right, you have your answer? It’s not hard, after all. I...
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‘Lay Down’: My Burden
This is not click bait! Miley Cyrus actually is relevant to this post! Everybody seems to be writing open letters to Miley Cyrus, especially, it seems, pop musicians who aren’t nearly as successful as...
View ArticleOn Line in New York City
New Yorkers have been on line since before there was online—for nearly a century, at least. They are so prominently on line, in fact, that those of us in the hinterland know it’s a way to identify New...
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Lying About Writing
A long time ago in a university far, far away (which I will not name), the English Literature department added to its undergraduate handbook a page of grammar and usage advice. That page, still...
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Louisville, Anyone?
Louisville skyline, Wikimedia Commons So how do you say the name of the biggest city in Kentucky, home of the Derby and Urban Bourbon? The spelling is easy enough. All agree on Louis-ville, that is,...
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‘No Hangeo’
Photograph courtesy of Kevin Alves(http://www.kevinalves.me/merk/) I’ve come across the expression on street corners, near pizzerias, outside grocery stores, always as a prohibition. The location is...
View ArticleBanning Students’ Native Dialects
The teaching profession in Britain, where I currently reside, has very largely heard the sociolinguistic music: The facts of linguistic diversity and language change are generally accepted, teachers...
View ArticleSpanglish and the Royal Academy
Not long ago, the Real Academia Española, its matrix located in Madrid, with 21 branches throughout the Spanish-speaking world, did something at once surprising and disappointing: It approved the...
View ArticleDARE in the Air
A half century of field work and lexicography came to completion earlier this year with publication of the last volume of that massive work, the Dictionary of American Regional English. It encompasses...
View ArticleWhy Doesn’t English Have an Academy?
The question routinely becomes a subject of debate. Does English need an institution to safeguard it, or at least to regulate its health? Spanish has the Real Academia Española; French, L’Académie...
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