Looking at American Speech
If you read Lingua Franca, you might be among the select few who want to know what is really going on with our language, as opposed to the many who mainly want to change it to their liking. Nothing...
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The Giants Won the Pennant
On Thursday, in the National League Championship Series game between San Francisco Giants and the St. Lous Cardinals, Giants outfiender Travis Ishikawa came to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning....
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Stuff Like That There
After Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants won the World Series Most Valuable Player award, Chevrolet called on a local regional manager to present Bumgarner with the keys to the truck that...
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Noping Out
“I love how that goat just nopes out of that situation.” And I love the ring of a newly hatched bit of slang that hasn’t even received its Urban Dictionary definition yet. Here, at its inception, nopes...
View ArticleThis Transatlantic Life
I’ll grant that it might have been my location at the time—sitting in a university clinic—that made the phrase “winding up in hospital” jump out at me when listening to a recent podcast of This...
View ArticleGeorge Curme: Orthographic Radical
As I promised last week, let me briefly discuss a further noteworthy fact about an interesting 1914 paper by George O. Curme. When I first saw the paper I thought there was a PDF encoding bug, or my...
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Can I Get a Better Way to Order Food?
Marvin Gaye A couple of years ago, the BBC published an essay on that staple of British journalism, the terribleness of Americanisms polluting the mother tongue. The Beeb invited readers to send in...
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#WOTY2014
This past Friday night was the 25th time that the American Dialect Society (ADS) has voted for the Word of the Year. We were reminded at the beginning of the meeting that this makes it only the 24th...
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A Real Tweet for Linguists
Early in January every year, nearly a thousand people who study how language works flock together for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America together with six smaller groups under its...
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He (or Possibly Him?) as Head
A commenter on a newspaper article about Prince Charles (the opinionated royal destined to inherit the throne under Britain’s hereditary monarchical and theocratic system of government) said this: The...
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O Canada! in New Orleans
“I’m so New Orleans, when I go out of town people ask me if I’m Canadian.” A joke, right? No, it seems that, contrary to all expectations, a certain Canadian pronunciation is beginning to emerge in the...
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Not by a Long Chalk
As I have mentioned here before, my hobby is writing and maintaining a blog about British expressions that have become popular in the United States. I know, I know. Listen, it keeps me off the street....
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Garage Sociolinguistics
Read the above title aloud before you continue. I have a real problem about pronouncing it. Let me explain. In the fall I was quite unexpectedly forced to move house. My new home has not only an...
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Nice Going, Genius
Scalia: Sarcastic In the slim annals of professorial humor, one of the cherished entries concerns an anthropological linguistics conference where the speaker declaims, “In languages all over the globe,...
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‘Dibs’: the Great Northern Parking Tradition
Say the magic word, and it’s yours. Please? No, not please. The magic word that truly cements ownership, at least for a lot of us, is dibs. If you’re not familiar with dibs, you can look it up. For...
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Comprise Yourself
Bryan Henderson’s hobby is eliminating comprised of from Wikipedia articles. Just another quixotic purist struggling to retard linguistic evolution? That’s what people seemed to think I’d say, as they...
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Lain, the Whom of the Verb World
The other day my Edinburgh colleague Professor D. Robert Ladd noticed an odd verb form in a subhead in The Guardian, under the arresting headline “Parisians carry on shopping as mass graves are...
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Mewling Quim
Loki It started with an e-mail in 2012 from a Londoner named John Stewart. He was writing to me because I conduct a blog called “Not One-Off Britishisms,” which deals with British words and expressions...
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Oh, Man
I did a mental double take the first time I heard my wife, Gigi, say the word policeman. She gave the second and third syllables roughly equal stress and said -man with an ash sound (what was...
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Requiem for a Dictionary? or Life Support?
A forensic linguist once used DARE to find a kidnapper, whose ransom note read “leave the money on the devil strip,” a term used in northern Ohio. Image courtesy DARE archives. Since the 19th century,...
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