A Bite of DARE
So what can the newly electrified cloud-based version of the Dictionary of American Regional English do that its paper antecedent can’t? If you’re lucky enough to have your own set of six volumes on...
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Because Word(s) of the Year 2013
Your hint about the outcome of this year’s Word of the Year vote at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (ADS) is right there in the headline. It was a lively gathering on a frigid Friday...
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Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Words
A colleague sent me a contest offering from the venerable American Scholar, magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Titled “Lingua Americana,” it begins by setting out examples of “wonderfully...
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‘All Plogged Up’… Am I All Alone?
Remedies for a plogged nose.(Image courtesy of flickr.) It could be the fact that it is below zero outside here in Michigan or it could be the sniffles that I seem to have acquired in the past 24...
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Happy Otchig Day!
Moonack in the sun (courtesy of Wikimedia) On what we could have called Otchig Day, February 2, legend says the gopher rat will emerge from its underground burrow to look for its shadow. In case of...
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Arrivederci! A Dopo!
I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The...
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Weed Better
In a piece the other day about Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC chat show, Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times noted that Farrow “made an effort to seem hip. He referred to marijuana as ‘weed’ and made an...
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That NPR Sound
Scott Simon: “My word!” I don’t get it when people say or imply that people on NPR all talk alike. To me their voices contain multitudes. To be sure, there’s no question that, if the factors that...
View ArticleUndivided by a Common Language
The alleged chasm that separates American from British English is often discussed in highly emotional terms. It probably won’t make me popular on either side of the Atlantic when I say that I think the...
View ArticleCommunicating With the Public
The last time I dared to look at Tom Chivers’s article about my work and my views online (published inSeven, the Sunday Telegraph magazine, March 16, 2014, 16–17), the number of comments had risen to...
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‘Yooper’ and ‘the Dictionary’
Michigan was buzzing last week with the news that the word Yooper is going to be included in the new edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary this spring. For those of you who may not know,...
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A Postcard From Salzburg
Members of Golden Dawn break up a dictionary launch in Athens. Photograph by Victor Friedman. Salzburg, Austria—Mozart’s beautiful city provided an ideal locale for the conference I am attending here,...
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On Clarity
What do John Boehner and Rachel Maddow have in common?Image: Screen shot from MSNBC, via The Blaze One cannot but be dismayed by the extent to which pollution of thought is endemic in our culture. The...
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The Commas Suit Ya
William S. Burroughs An interesting Slate piece a few months back by Matthew J.X. Malady noted many Twitter users’ disdain for commas. It’s not just a matter of being frugal with punctuation in order...
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There Was No Committee
British empire, 1919. Image courtesy Historic UK English is becoming a global lingua franca not just for trade, industry, aviation, research, and entertainment, but also for higher education. We...
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Bully for Them
Theodore Roosevelt was apparently the first candidate to declare, “My hat is in the ring.” If you’re looking for a great summer read, and you anticipate a summer with a lot of time on your hands, I...
View ArticleSwitchin’ It Up
Linguists sometimes get discouraged about the rampant prescriptivism in public discussions of language. This past week was no exception, as many of us watched with some dismay as both friends and...
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All Set With That
I recently returned from a vacation to southeastern Massachusetts, where my wife grew up and I know of as the home of the greatest restaurant in the world (apologies to Calvin Trillin, longtime...
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The ‘Girlfriend’ Experience
Paris Hilton and her tiny dog. Certain books are so brilliant in idea and execution that they are deservedly and repeatedly revised, eventually coming to be referred to by the author’s last name long...
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Sounding Real by Speaking Fake
Arthur Chu is apparently best known as one of the top Jeopardy! winners of all time, but since I haven’t watched Jeopardy! since the last millennium, I have no opinion on his style of play or use of...
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