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Who’s Polluting Whose English?
Lynne Murphy First, a quiz. Choose the country in which the following words or phrases originated, by writing either a “B” (Britain) or “U” (United States) next to the number. Answers are at the end of...
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Can You Explain What a Shibboleth Is?
I could hardly believe my ears. The BBC, on a radio news program and then again on the 8 a.m. news, quoted a British politician as saying “I think we must also recognize that there are real economic...
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Will the Fixer ‘Flip’? Here Are the Many Meanings of That Word
Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen appeared for a court hearing last week after the FBI’s raid on his hotel room and office. (Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images) The commander in chief turned to Twitter...
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Why Are Young People Trying to Talk Fancy?
The Canadian William Shatner pronounced the word civil-eye-zations, even though the character he played was from Iowa. I have in my repertoire one parlor trick. I do it when chatting with someone whose...
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A Week on Language Twitter
“You can observe a lot by just watching,” Yogi Berra once supposedly said. To which I’ll add, you can learn a lot about developments in the language by just hanging out on Twitter and Facebook. To...
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Phoneme Husbandry in Delaware County, Pa.
Yogi Bear and picanic basket I have been living in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, southwest of Philadelphia, for coming on 25 years, and I am finally getting a handle on the way people talk around...
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Every Quarter, More of How We Talk: ‘DARE’ Lives On
Fieldworkers compiling the “Dictionary of American Regional English” in 1972. Have you enjoyed the taste of a cabinet this summer? If so, unless you’re a termite, you are probably from Rhode Island or...
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Is ‘You Guys’ Replacing ‘Y’All’ in the South?
What do you think, guys? Is “y’all” in trouble? For some time, “y’all” has been assaulted by “you guys” aiming to replace it as the go-to second-person-plural pronoun in the South. Is the Solid South...
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Friendly Communication Across Supposed Language Barriers
Across the street from the building that houses the linguists, philosophers, and computer scientists at my university (on the left in the picture above) is the city’s huge central mosque. Hundreds of...
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Where Are You Going? a Bus Ride Through the Languages of Ecuador
Cuenca, Ecuador ¿Adónde van? Asked the bus-station clerk in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, yesterday morning. It’s a reasonable question. Where am I going? A few moments later from a rear seat I...
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Puerto Rican in Spain: 2 Grad Students Reflect on Language and Spanish Higher...
U. of Barcelona Wireliz Soto-González recently completed her master’s in art history at the University of Barcelona. Jorge Fernández de Jesús received a master’s in biology at the University of...
View ArticleShtraight Talk on S-Backing
I believe peak s-backing was reached on August 1, 2018. In a segment of NPR’s All Things Considered that day, the host, Audie Cornish; the NPR correspondent she was speaking with, Ayesha Rascoe; and...
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Chinese Among High-School Seniors (and in the Movies)
Jason Statham and Bingbing Li in The Meg, a bilingual Chinese/American movie. There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as...
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The Perennial Difficulty of Defining What ‘Descriptive’ Means in Grammar
“Correct” summerhouse “Incorrect” summerhouse Correct summerhouse Incorrect summerhouse I have a distinguished colleague who unceasingly tries to persuade me to see that my attempts at descriptive...
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How Americans Speak: the Facts
Noam Chomsky: no Philly vowels(Image via Wikipedia) If you really want to know how people use the English language in North America, you will find one consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of...
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Is Donald Trump the Andrew Jackson of Our Time?
Donald Trump has a unique way of speaking and writing. But for a president his language is not unprecedented. Or not unpresidented. In 2004, after considering the speech of all 42 different presidents...
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Why Do I Really, Really Want to Say ‘Had Went’?
Jonah Hill in his younger days Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on October 30, the actor and director Jonah Hill was talking about his childhood obsession with movies. “I had ran through so many films,”...
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