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Good on Us
Like others in this forum, I try to keep abreast of changes in idiom over time. We notice the emergence of vocal fry, the increasing acceptance of singular they, and so on. But for the most part, our...
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Being a Subjunctive
Teaching them who Buddy Holly was would be more valuable than trying to make them shun covertly inflected mandative clauses. For grammar bullies “the subjunctive” is sacred ground. Reforms proposed...
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Being an Antecedent
On the morning of April 1, I heard a BBC newsreader say (without levity, April Fool’s Day though it was) that Sajid Javid, the British government’s secretary of state for business, innovation, and...
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Hillary Who?
Noting that I’ve written about the hip-hop/youth/New York trend of glottalizing (that is, “swallowing” the t before the last syllable) such words as important, button, and Manhattan, a reader recently...
View ArticleCorrect/Incorrect Grammar-Test Items
An English teacher living in Jerusalem wrote to ask me to resolve a dispute about a test question. Someone had set a correct/incorrect test on the preterite (the simple past, e.g. took) vs. the...
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DARE to Carry Guts to a Bear
In 1985, to much acclaim, Harvard University Press published an ABC of American English — the first volume of the monumental Dictionary of American Regional English, edited by Frederic G. Cassidy and...
View ArticleBad Optics
“Tarzan has always had bad optics — white hero, black land — to state the excessively obvious,” wrote Manohla Dargas in her review of The Legend of Tarzan in The New York Times. This time around, the...
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In the Phonetic Jungle
A distinguished computational linguist from the University of Colorado, Professor Martha Palmer, is about to begin a lecture in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh under the title...
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Brit Thesps Nail Yank Lingo
Hugh Laurie can talk the talk. The American characters in Genius — screening earlier this summer in art-house cinemas everywhere — are played by the following actors. Thomas Wolfe: Jude Law (English)...
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New in DARE: Bird’s Nest on the Ground
Flicker/Leimenide The six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, completed in print in 2012, continues to augment its coverage with quarterly updates by the chief editor, George Goebel, at the...
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To Seek Out New Vowels …
Part of my teaching this semester (with my colleague Alice Turk) involves an exploration of space: the space of the remarkable array of speech sounds humans can produce. Consider just the vowel space,...
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From N.H. to La.: ‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ Update No. 6
What do bob house, boo-hag, and bullnozer have to do with each other? In case you’re not familiar with these terms, a bob house is what people in New Hampshire, some of them at least, call an...
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Won’t He Do It!
The writer Tayari Jones recently posted a question on Facebook about a phrase she’s planning to use in her forthcoming novel: “Won’t He do it!” I immediately felt the interest of, say, a cat in catnip,...
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Make American Accents Great Again
Image by Jenny Chang, courtesy of BuzzFeed* A recent Daily Briefing email newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education to its subscribers included this snippet of news from a sample of faculty...
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Where Are the Happiness Boys?
Exactly 58 years ago today (I write on December 17, 2016), E.B. White wrote a letter of protest to his editor, J.G. Case, who had been trying to get him to take some grammar advice and modify some of...
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Decrying Dialects and Despising Speakers
A stranger I will call DL recently emailed me an odious screed pouring contempt and disgust on nonstandard dialects of English. “Speaking broken English is often a sign that the speaker is monolingual...
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Recovering My Heritage
It’s January 25, and as everyone knows, that is the birthday of the Bard of Ayrshire: Robert Burns. And since a small conference on the Scots language is being held today at the University of...
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A Language Museum?
Franklin School in Washington, D.C. (Image via Wikimedia Commons.) The question mark was to get your attention. As of last Wednesday, we can change it to a period: A language museum. On January 25, the...
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When Two Negatives Don’t Make a Positive
Image via Wikipedia.org Many English grammar advice sites on the web are so dire that it almost seems rude to link to them. I don’t want to fail in my duty to clarify things by deconstructing them; yet...
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How Not to Teach Chinese
Victor Mair wrote on Language Log last month about a test in what appears to have been a third-year class in Chinese at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, in New York. What made it news in...
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