Etymologie, Etimología, Étymologie, Etimologia, Etymology, (griech.) etymología, (lat.) etymologia, (esper.) etimologio
US Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, Estados Unidos de América, États-Unis d'Amérique, Stati Uniti d'America, United States of America, (esper.) Unuigintaj Statoj de Ameriko
Weblogs, Weblogs, Weblogs, Weblogs, Weblogs, (esper.) retotaglibroj, blogoj

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alt-usage-english (AUE)
Multi-Site Index
Word List

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at loggerheads
logger
loggerhead (W3)

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Blog
blog
web
Wabe
Waffel
log
Logbuch
Weblog
to blog
blogger
Blogistan
Blogosphere
blognoscenti
Vom Holzblock zum virtuellen Tagebuch (W1)

A clipping of "weblog", "blog" is internet jargon for what is basically an online journal or diary. Blogs are most often maintained by a single person, updated regularly, and center on a particular topic or theme.

Usage 1: The word is also used as a verb, "to blog" and a person who blogs is a "blogger". The blog community (sometimes called "Blogistan" or the "Blogosphere") has a very developed lingo. The "blognoscenti" can find a glossary at "samizdata".

This is a glossary of blog terminology, including obscure words directly related to blogging and expressions commonly encountered in the blogosphere (qv) which might be obscure to the uninitiated.

Suggested usage: Leave it to the Internet to take that private activity of writing a diary and turn it into publishing. Anybody can blog these days and you can find everyone from teenagers and expectant parents to celebrities and pundits sharing their thoughts online. While some "blogs" are exercises in navel-gazing, many resemble discussion boards (like our Agora), inviting comment and interaction.

Etymology:
The term "weblog" is attributed to "artificial intelligence" researcher Jorn Barger who used it in 1997. The clipping to "blog" occurred in 1999 and was coined by web designer Peter Merholz on his own blog. As you can see in the Usage section, the word has spawned a lexicon of its own. You aren't likely to find the word in a dictionary just yet, but you will. (Our thanks to writer Ron Suresha of Providence, Rhode Island for suggesting today's word.)

• Bloggers Can Be Fakers
• Plain Layne (and other fake bloggers)

Weblog resources FAQ
Jorn Barger, September 1999
...
Robot Wisdom Weblog was the first to use the name "weblog", in December 1997.
...

...
In die 24. Auflage des Duden, die am 22. Juli (2006) in die Läden kommt, hat nun auch das/der "Blog" Einzug gefunden. Richtig gelesen, beide Schreibweisen sind korrekt: "Blog, das, auch der;" befand salomonisch die Dudenredaktion. "Wir beobachten solche Diskussionen wie 'der' oder 'das' Blog aus der Distanz und bewerten dann", sagt Werner Scholze-Stubenrecht, der als stellvertretender Leiter der Dudenredaktion für die Neuauflage verantwortlich zeichnet.
...

Kluge, Friedrich: Seemannssprache

"Logbuch" "Tabelle, in welche die Stunden des Tages und der Nacht, die Richtung des Windes und Lauf, Fahrt und Kurs des Schiffes eingetragen wird" Friedrichson 1879. Vgl. Niebuhr 1774 Reisebeschr. I 6 da ich bemerkte, daß unsere Rechnung nach dem Logbuch uns bey unserer Ausreise weiter nördlich und bey unserer Zurückkunft weiter südlich brachte als wir würcklich waren, so untersuchte ich die Loglinie.

Mylius 1785 Pickle III 190 Jezunder, da die Klappe an meiner Luftpumpe noch im Stand is, mocht' ich Euch gern eens un's annere sagen dhun, un seht Ihr, ich will hoffen, Ihr werdet's in Eur Logbuch schreiben, um Euch dran zu erinnern, wenn ich steif bin.

Brarens 1807 Steuermannskunde S. 34 Ist ein Logbuch zur Anzeichnung der Koursen und Distanzen in Bereitschaft.

Gortz 1852 Reise um d. Welt I 31 die Ortsbestimmung ist mittelst astronomischer Eselsbrücken schnell erfolgt und ist in das Logbuch, welches analog den Büchern der Kaufleute gewissenhaft geführt werden muß, einzutragen.

Wilh. Heine 1856 Reise um d. Erde I 15 die Schnelligkeit des Schiffs zu bestimmen, was dann in das Logbuch aufgezeichnet wird.

Mollhausen 1887 Loggbuch 16 Loggbuch von Barnabas Bostig, stand auf dem Deckel eines mächtigen, uber drei Zoll dicken Foliobandes mit großen, etwas unregelmäßigen lateinischen Buchstaben geschrieben.

...
Did you know?

"-log-" comes from Greek, where it has the meaning "speak"; "word"; "speech". While it is completely unrelated to the English word "log", this meaning is found in many English words, such as: "analog", "apology", "chronology", "decalogue", "dialogue", "doxology", "epilogue", "eulogy", "ideology", "logarithm", "logic", "logo", "monologue", "neologism", "philology", "syllogism", "tautology", "terminology".

Origin

The noun "log", meaning "large piece of tree", dates back to the mid-14th century, as the Middle English "logge". It was a variant of "lugge" ("pole", "limb of tree"), but the origin is uncertain. It is probably related to the Old Norse "lag" ("felled tree"), but some linguists actually think its origin is different: the expression of something very large with an appropriate sound, and could be related to "clog" (which as we saw before, originally meant "lump of wood"). "Log", meaning "a record of activities", dates back to the 19th century, and is a shortened form of "log-book" (which dates back to the 17th century), a term used by sailors. It was called a "log book" because it recorded speed measurements that were made using the weighted chip of a "tree log" on the end of a "log line" with knots. The sailors counted how long the line took to stretch out in the water, and the knots on the rope are the reason speed at sea is still measured in units called "knots". The verb "log" ("to fell a tree") comes from the noun and first appeared in the early 18th century, while the verb meaning "to record something" comes from the other meaning of the noun, and dates back to the 19th century.
...

The History of Blogging
The origins of blogging go further back than the Internet to the days of personal diaries, chronicles and other written forms of personal musings. Today, a blog is considered to be a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual or company.
...
The word "blog" itself is a play on the words "Weblog", as most blogs will be displayed in a journal or log entry format, where most are updated daily or more frequently than most Web sites would be.
...
The Origins of the Word Blog
The "Blog Herald" cites the origins of the term "weblog" to G. Raikundalia & M. Rees, two lecturers from Bond University on the Gold Coast. The term was first used in a paper titled "Exploiting the World-Wide Web for Electronic Meeting Document Analysis and Management." Popular use of the term "Weblog" as we know it today is from Jorn Barger of the "Weblog Robot Wisdom" (robotwisdom.com) in December 1997. Barger coined the term "weblog" meaning "logging the Web". In 1999 programmer Peter Merholz shortened the term "weblog" to "blog".
...

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Bloggle
Google uebernimmt Blogger (W3)

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daypop
Weblog-Suchmaschine
Etymologie-Suche
Etymology-Search

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Folksonomy (W3)

Folksonomy is a term coined by ThomasVanderWal used to describe the BottomUp taxonomy development as done in social networking sites like http://flickr.com and http://del.icio.us as well as others. GeneSmith brought the term forward for wide consumption.

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google
Etymologie in Weblogs

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Uni Illinois
Web of Language - WOL

A regular blog by Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois.

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Read the Web of Language:

it's the go-to site for language in the news - whether it's official English, Spanish in the US, grammar and usage, language politics, or the linguistic twisting of politicians, you can read all about it on the Web of Language. Don't miss updates: bookmark the Web of Language in your browser or newsfeed, or subscribe and get email links to the latest posts.
...

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languagehat
LanguageHat

Archives April 2010 - July 2002

Search Results from languagehat.com

• MORE ETYMOLOGIES.
• More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths: colon 'part of the large intestine' goes back to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 5, 2010 02:12 PM



• RIDLEY.
• Looking up something else in my Merriam-Webster, I ran across ridley, the name of two varieties of sea turtle. What struck me was the conjunction of the etymology and the date, respectively "unknown" and 1926. There are lots of words...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 15, 2009 11:55 AM



• MALAY COOTIES.
• Jordan at Macvaysia has been wondering whether the English word cooties, which he defines as "an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids," might come from Malay kudis 'scabies' (Indonesian...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 6, 2009 05:46 PM



• OHEL ON WEBSTER'S THIRD.
• One of the sections I was most anticipating in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (previous posts: 1, 2) was the discussion of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, one of the greatest and most controversial landmarks of American lexicography, and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 30, 2009 09:40 PM



• OHEL ON AMERICAN DICTIONARIES.
• Continuing my exhilarated exploration of The Oxford History of English Lexicography, I would like to report on chapter 9, "Major American Dictionaries" by Sidney I. Landau. I thought I had a fairly good grasp of the subject, but I had...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 20, 2009 08:27 PM



• BIRD DICTIONARY.
• A few years ago I posted a link to Denis Lepage's Avibase, an amazingly comprehensive bird site ("containing over 4.5 million records about 10,000 species and 22,000 subspecies of birds, including distribution information, taxonomy, synonyms in several languages and more"),...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 18, 2009 07:23 PM



• OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY.
• The good people at Oxford UP sent me a review copy of The Oxford History of English Lexicography; they must have been pretty confident I'd like it, because it's an expensive two-volume set, and their confidence was not misplaced. This...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 8, 2009 09:23 PM



• ATLAS OF TRUE NAMES.
• Via a NY Times "Lede" post (thanks, Bonnie!), I learned about the Atlas of True Names:The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World and Europe. For...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 23, 2008 02:36 PM



• MOOSE/ELK II.
• A couple of years ago I wrote about the fact that the American moose is the same as the European elk (the American "elk" being an entirely different creature), citing Mallory and Adams' The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 27, 2008 10:02 AM



• TWO ETYMOLOGIES.
• I recently ran across a Russian word unknown to me, ??? [mukhoyár], an obsolete term for a kind of cotton fabric mixed with silk or wool. It looks like a purely Slavic word, perhaps having something to do with ???...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 19, 2008 10:36 AM



• ANGLO-NORMAN DICTIONARY.
• The Anglo-Norman Dictionary was announced in the late 1940s and began publishing in 1979, the last fascicle coming out in 1994; Glanville Price in his review for The Modern Language Review said it "is likely to have a major impact...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2008 08:29 PM



• RIP LAURENCE URDANG.
• I keep forgetting to post the NY Times obit (by Bruce Weber) of lexicographer Laurence Urdang. He was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which is the first dictionary I...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 4, 2008 03:58 PM



• GEORGE ELIOT, HISTORICAL LINGUIST.
• I finally remembered to share this tidbit from Middlemarch (we're over two-thirds of the way through the novel, and will soon have to start thinking about what to follow it with for our nightly readings); it's from Chapter 48:But Mr...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 28, 2008 09:49 PM



• IE LOANWORDS IN FINNISH.
• The creator of Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish has done a splendid job. Mind you, I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of the etymologies, but they're very well presented, and the approach inspires confidence:The data...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 18, 2008 09:02 PM



• MY EYE AND BETTY.
• I don't know how many people are still familiar with the old expression of incredulity "All my eye and Betty Martin" (e.g., from Walter De la Mare's 1930 On Edge: "You might be suggesting that both shape and scarecrow too...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 12, 2008 09:56 AM



• DESCRIPTIVISM AS SLAVE MORALITY.
• Mark Liberman at the Log quotes a message from a correspondent who, after some high-minded insults ("disingenuous … smug … misrepresentations …"), gets down to brass tacks:At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 10, 2008 10:17 AM



• PROUST: THE SUMMING-UP.
• My wife and I unexpectedly finished Proust last night (I'd thought it would last another day) and sat up talking about it for a while, and now I'm going to try to organize my thoughts about the year-and-a-half-long experience and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 4, 2008 12:31 PM



• A COUPLE OF BLOGS.
• I've recently become aware of these language-oriented blogs: Cognition and Language Lab focuses on "experiments through the Web testing human reasoning, particularly in the domain of language": "Long-time readers know that the major focus of my research is on how...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 10, 2008 09:04 PM



• ETYMOLOGY IN PROUST.
• The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 8, 2007 06:07 PM



• MAFFICKING.
• I used the verb maffick (OED: "To celebrate uproariously, rejoice extravagantly") last night, and my wife asked where it was from. I said "That's one of my favorite etymologies," and when I told her she agreed it was pretty damn...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 14, 2007 08:07 PM



• XOC > SHARK?
• The comment thread on this post quickly mutated into a discussion of the etymology of the word shark; commenter dearieme quoted Michael D. Coe as saying "Tom Jones has recently proved that 'xoc' [in Maya] is the origin of the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2007 08:27 PM



• BONOBO.
• I'm reading an interesting articla (single-page printable version) by Ian Parker in the latest New Yorker ("Swingers: Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?"), and I've just come across an etymological tidbit:For decades, “pygmy chimpanzee” remained...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 28, 2007 12:55 PM



• MISCELLANY.
• 1. Inspired by this LH post, Joel of Far Outliers has posted a very useful summary of the history and uses of the Japanese kana syllabaries. 2. It turns out the word ramen does not have a firm etymology. Wikipedia:Though...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 1, 2007 10:07 AM



• KHOSH.
• There's an extremely interesting discussion going on over at Jabal al-Lughat. Lameen starts by pointing out that "in all dialects of Arabic, adjectives normally follow the noun" but quotes T. M. Johnstone (Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, Oxford UP 1967):The (Persian)...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 29, 2007 01:48 PM



• BURUSHASKI.
• There's something romantic about language isolates. The most famous is Basque (subject of much crackpottery); others are Ainu and the Siberian languages Ket and Nivkh (also known as Gilyak). In and around the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, almost 90,000...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 22, 2007 09:02 AM



• PERSIAN ETYMOLOGY.
• Polyglot Vegetarian has another superb post, this one on the linguistic history of Persian ??? panir 'cheese,' which like many Persian words has spread throughout Western Asia (it will be familiar to many as the "paneer" of Indian restaurants). I...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 19, 2007 09:15 AM



• SOME ETYMOLOGIES.
• Random finds while looking up other words in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate: capoeira 'a Brazilian dance of African origin': Brazilian Portuguese, kind of martial art, ruffian skilled in this art, fugitive slave living in the forest, from capão island of forest in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 27, 2006 10:12 AM



• PANCOAST.
• An occasional feature here at LH is Family Names With Surprising Etymologies (e.g., Janeway), and today's is Pancoast. When my nonagenarian mother-in-law mentioned that somebody she'd known seventy years ago was called that, I thought she might be misremembering, but...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 30, 2006 10:51 AM



• GRIOT.
• I'm as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don't have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 13, 2006 02:27 PM



• COIL!
• Etymologies are usually staid affairs; whether they are long lists of preforms and cognates or simple statements that the origin is unknown, they are devoid of passion, humor, and exclamation marks. Not so that of the OED's coil2 "Noisy disturbance,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 27, 2006 06:57 PM



• TWO LEMMAS.
• Looking up something else, I happened to notice that English has two words lemma: lemma 'auxiliary proposition; glossed word or phrase' and lemma 'the lower of the two bracts enclosing the flower in the spikelet of grasses.' Not particularly noteworthy...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 26, 2006 08:05 PM



• SAFIRE 1, COPYEDITORS 0.
• We here at Casa Languagehat believe in fairness to the point of gritted teeth, yea, unto the uttering of small yips of pain. Having twice this month (1, 2) spifflicated William Safire, the oft-erring language columnist of the New York...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2006 01:44 PM



• POLISH AND INDO-EUROPEAN.
• As part of his online Grammar of the Polish Language, Grzegorz Jagodzinski has a list of Polish etymologies, a table of numerals in some of the main IE languages, and a detailed discussion of the etymology of the Polish (and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 1, 2005 04:07 PM



• GETTING RITE RIGHT.
• So I've been reading a book by James G. Cowan called The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition, and I've been putting up with balderdash like "This suggests that science has no way of answering problems posed by the spirit, however...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 4, 2005 07:01 PM



• MEXICAN AND GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES.
• The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua maintains on its website the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos, containing Spanish definitions of words peculiar to Mexico, and the Diccionario geográfico universal, whose entries often give "local pronunciation" and the Spanish adjective derived from...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 29, 2005 06:01 PM



• ARABIC WORDS IN SPANISH.
• Over at après moi, le déluge, silmarillion has posted a list of all the Spanish words borrowed from Arabic, using the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (both printed and online editions), the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), the American...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 24, 2005 10:44 PM



• BARBARIAN NAMES.
• In an effort to find out something about the Isaurians and their language (a vain effort, and if anybody knows anything beyond "warlike" and "unknown" I'd appreciate hearing about it) I ran across Vassil Karloukovski's Page, with its many Bulgarian-related...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 28, 2005 06:19 PM



• JAPANESE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY.
• Matt of No-Sword has posted about the new Nihongogen Daijiten, the 'Big Dictionary of Japanese Etymology.' If I knew Japanese, I would definitely want this book, but I'm disappointed by Matt's description:The Nihongogen Daijiten is an attempt to solve or...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 15, 2005 08:27 PM



• NARTS FOR CHRISTMAS.
• I got a number of excellent things for Christmas (including a Boris Barnet double feature I can't wait to see), but the one I want to babble about here is a gift from my lovely and generous wife: Nart Sagas...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 25, 2004 06:24 PM





• KAMIKAZE.
• I had always understood (as the etymologies in dictionaries told me) that the word kamikaze means 'divine wind' in Japanese, originally referred to the storms that hit the Mongol fleet in 1281 and saved Japan from invasion, and was later...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 22, 2004 11:44 AM



• BEAT THE JUDGE.
• To quote Andrew Zangrilli, from whose Blogbook post I took this list:Do you have a good vocabulary? Prove it, smarty. Test your knowledge against the vocab champ, Judge Selya of the First Circuit. The following word list was gathered from...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 5, 2004 04:33 PM



• JAVELINA.
• Once again the NY Times has increased my vocabulary. A story about a small New Mexico town describes its current state of decay: "And these days, more animals than people can be found wandering the streets. Quail, javelinas and the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 26, 2004 06:21 PM



• KOONTZ ON SIOUXAN LANGUAGES.
• John Koontz, a linguist at the University of Colorado, has a website full of information about Siouan and Other Native American Languages, with a particularly interesting page about etymologies (including Kemosabe and Tonto, an entry that manages to cite both...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2004 02:21 PM



• ETYMOLOGIC.
• The creators of Etymologic! call it "the toughest word game on the web," and for all I know they may be right.In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2004 10:08 PM



• ETYMOLOGIE.
• Or, to give the site its full name, Etymologie, Etimología, Étymologie, Etimologia, Etymology, (griech.) etymología, (lat.) etymologia, (esper.) etimologio / __ Welt, World, Le Monde / Sprachen der Länder. It's a collection of language links, with descriptions in German or English, followed by a (very incomplete) list of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 2, 2004 10:26 PM



• FAJITAS AND FALAFEL.
• No, that's not a multicultural dinner menu, it's a couple of interesting etymologies I ran across in my research for my last post. Fajita is an American Spanish diminutive of faja 'band, strip,' from Latin fascia 'band, bandage,' which is...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 26, 2004 10:08 PM



• RAT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY.
• The most comprehensive interspecies dictionary available in paperback!Over 5,000 references, 80,000 translations and hundreds of new expressions! Contains usage notes to avoid being bitten, and slang signals on a wide variety of subjects. Contains examples to show how sounds are...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 23, 2004 02:06 PM



• POLISH ONLINE DICTIONARY.
• The Omnia online dictionary defines [non-]Polish words [and expressions] in Polish, and thus is not of much use to those who do not know that language—except that it also includes etymologies, so if you have even a basic acquaintance with...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 21, 2004 05:02 PM



• CORPORATE ETYMOLOGIES.
• This fascinating site gives the origins of all sorts of company names. Who knew that Apache got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon, resulting in "a patchy" server, or...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 14, 2004 02:00 PM



• RIVAL.
• Via the newly active riley dog (now relocated to the Yukon), I got to a clever three-part poem, "A Lesson" by Jeanne Marie Beaumont, whose first part, "Vocabulary," contains the lines:Sty and style are not related; neither are braid and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 3, 2004 04:17 PM



• NYAMWEZI.
• As I make my way through Dalby's Dictionary of Languages, I run across all sorts of fascinating tidbits in the sidebars. In the entry for Sukuma, an important language of northern Tanzania, there is also information about its sister language...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 23, 2004 10:20 PM



• BIOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE.
• Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature gives some of the weirder etymologies of species names: Aegrotocatellus Adrian and Edgecombe, 1995 (trilobite) Latin for "sick puppy". Brachyanax thelestrephones Evenhuis, 1981 (fly) The name translates from Greek to "little chief nipple twister". Campsicnemius charliechaplini...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2004 10:45 PM



• RATING THE DICTIONARIES.
• YiLing Chen-Josephson gives a spin around the block to "seven of the relatively affordable and frequently updated college dictionaries" and rates them on a point system (for stock, definitions, usage guidance, etymologies, and enjoyment) in a Slate article. It's an...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 8, 2003 07:04 PM



• CAVIAR.
• I was looking at the book Caviar by the delightfully named Inga Saffron when I was stopped cold by an excursus on the etymology of the word caviar. She found the OED's etymology boring and confusing:Of uncertain origin, found in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 29, 2003 12:58 PM



• WIKTIONARY.
• Pat tells me about an offshoot of Wikipedia called the Wiktionary, "a collaborative project to produce a free multilingual dictionary in every language, with meanings, etymologies and pronunciations... We started on December 12, 2002 and already have 22143 entries in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 10, 2003 08:53 PM



• WORDS FOR IDLERS.
• An Idler's Glossary: an annotated lexicon of words for the theory and practice of non-working. As usual with such things, distrust the etymologies ("Laggard is how the Norwegians say it"—no it's not) but enjoy the brio.apathetic: Because of his supine...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 29, 2003 12:17 PM



• BEST LETTER EVER, OR MAT REVISITED.
• The mail section of the latest New Yorker is entirely taken up with responses to the recent Erofeyev article on mat. I will reproduce here what is, hands down, the best letter-to-the-editor I have ever read (from a Languagehat standpoint,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2003 06:43 PM



• HEROIC ETYMOLOGY.
• Marc Miyake over at Abode of Amritas has a post that goes into obsessive detail (just what I like) about the history and connections of the four characters that make up the Chinese name, Yingxiong shidai, of the forthcoming comic...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 19, 2003 11:57 AM



• SOME WORDS.
• A few obscure words I've come across recently, with unexpected meanings or etymologies (cited here from the OED): adversaria 'A commonplace-book, a place in which to note things as they occur; collections of miscellaneous remarks or observations; also commentaries or...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 16, 2003 09:32 PM



• FINNISH ETHNONYMS.
• A detailed abstract of a book (Riho Grünthal, Livvistä liiviin. Itämerensuomalaiset etnonyymit [= Finnic ethnonyms], 1997) on "names referring to Finnic groups either linguistically or geographically." The basic breakdown:...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 3, 2003 12:18 PM



• ERROR.
• I tried to resist, I really did—I know I have a book problem—but I couldn't resist at least looking at a book with the title Error and the Academic Self, and the table of contents was irresistible: Introduction: The Pursuit...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 26, 2003 08:28 PM



• ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.
• The Encyclopedia of North American Indians has entries on many facets of Native American life and civilization, including languages; there are separate articles on Algonquian, Cherokee, and half a dozen other languages and families. From the Cherokee page:Cherokee has a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 1, 2003 08:07 PM



• AUSTRALIAN WORD MAP.
• "Word Map is mapping Australian regionalisms—words, phrases or expressions used by particular language groups." Click on "Map search" at the left and you'll get a map divided into regions; click on one to find words and phrases peculiar to it....
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 31, 2003 10:12 PM



• THE KASKASKIA MAN.
• I don't even know how to start telling you about Carl Masthay and his obsessively compiled and self-published Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French Dictionary. Just go read the Riverfront Times article (by Matthew Everett); you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder how he finds...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 12, 2003 10:46 PM



• GREAT AND DEAR LEADERS.
• William Safire's column in today's NY Times Magazine has a useful discussion of the well-known bynames of the late Kim Il Song and his son and heir Kim Jong Il:In 1994, Kim Il Sung (Great Kim) died and was succeeded...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 2, 2003 04:18 PM



• BAD ETYMOLOGY.
• I'm used to seeing dubious or just plain wrong etymologies, both online and off-, and usually I just ignore them. This site, however, is so bad that I feel the need to give it a public thrashing. It purports to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2003 10:50 AM



• TAKING LANGUAGES SERIOUSLY.
• I recently bought Youssou N'Dour's new album Nothing's in Vain (Coono du reer), and having opened and played it today I am doubly delighted—not just by the music, which is wonderful, but by the booklet. For once, an African language...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 18, 2003 11:21 PM

Search Results from languagehat.com

• MORION.
• There are two nouns morion; the first, meaning a kind of helmet, does not concern us here (it is probably from Spanish morrión), but the second, a variety of smoky quartz, has an interesting etymology: it is from a Latin...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 29, 2010 11:41 AM



• WHITNEYS, BOOKPLATES, HOT DOGS, AND YANKEES.
• The March/April 2010 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine is particularly rich in LH-related items. First comes a nice writeup of William Dwight Whitney, "who served for four decades as the University Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale":Whitney...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 18, 2010 02:19 PM



• CREW.
• Another interesting etymology (this is the kind of thing that catches my attention when I'm copyediting a dictionary): crew originally meant 'reinforcement(s)' in the military sense, as can be seen from the first citation in the OED, "1455 Rolls of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 17, 2010 09:32 AM



• COUNTERPANE.
• I always liked counterpane, an old word for a bedspread, but I never knew its etymology, which is quite unexpected: it's an alteration of earlier counterpoint (due to an association with obsolete pane 'cloth'), but that counterpoint is an entirely...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 16, 2010 02:23 PM



• MORE ETYMOLOGIES.
• More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths: colon 'part of the large intestine' goes back to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 5, 2010 02:12 PM



• COLLATION.
• Copyediting dictionaries is tedious work but I always learn things. I just discovered that the word collation, in the sense of 'light meal,' comes from the title of John Cassian's early fifth-century work Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences with...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 1, 2010 04:48 PM



• GREEK WORDLE AND TZETZES.
• Nick (aka opoudjis) over at Illinistefkondos took such a long break from posting I stopped visiting, and now when I finally get around to checking in I find all manner of goodies, which we can divide into two categories: 1)...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 6, 2010 04:00 PM



• PUFFED UP.
• I know I blog about Russian stuff a lot, doubtless too much for some readers, and I apologize in advance for the nature of this post, since unless you actually know Russian it won't be of interest, but it's such...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 21, 2010 07:52 PM



• ON FREE VERSE.
• Anatoly has a thought-provoking post today that I thought I'd translate and bring to the attention of those who don't read Russian:It sometimes happens that a field of study arises and organizes itself around some big problem, standing before it...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 8, 2010 11:09 AM



• THE BOOKSHELF: MISCELLANY.
• I've got a small stack of books that publishers have sent me and I've enjoyed looking through, but for one reason or another haven't written posts about. Here's a brief description of each; any of them would make a good...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 24, 2009 03:16 PM



• RIDLEY.
• Looking up something else in my Merriam-Webster, I ran across ridley, the name of two varieties of sea turtle. What struck me was the conjunction of the etymology and the date, respectively "unknown" and 1926. There are lots of words...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 15, 2009 11:55 AM



• ALGERNON.
• This thread quickly wandered into a discussion of the wonderful 1952 film version of The Importance of Being Earnest directed by Anthony Asquith, with Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Greenwood, and of course Edith Evans as the definitive...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 30, 2009 08:52 PM



• THE BOOKSHELF: FOWLER CLASSIC.
• I have loved H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ever since I snagged a beat-up copy of the 1926 first edition at a library sale almost forty years ago. I was never interested in the successive revisions,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 28, 2009 06:33 PM



• THE TATARMAN OF VAMBERY.
• Don't miss the Poemas del río Wang post about one of those astonishing 19th-century wanderers long forgotten in the rush to delineate the world and its history in nationalist terms, with neat little boxes in which Persians live in Persia...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 13, 2009 08:38 PM



• EHEES.
• In checking the bibliography of a book I'm copyediting, I hit an article titled "La typologie des catalogues d’Éhées: un réseau généalogique thématisé." I was stopped in my tracks by the bizarre (to me) word Éhées; I could make no...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 20, 2009 10:39 AM



• STÆFCRÆFT.
• Ben Slade, a grad student in linguistics, has started a blog, Stæfcræft & Vyakara?a (linking Old English and Sanskrit words for 'linguistics,' or as close as those languages get to the concept), and it's a gem. His last two posts...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 18, 2009 07:49 PM



• SOLET AND KEMACH.
• Balashon, a Hebrew-oriented blog with a focus on etymology (see here), has a new post discussing the Hebrew words solet ??? and kemach ???, both meaning 'flour.' Since MMcM is on extended hiatus, it's good to have someone else doing...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 14, 2009 08:59 PM



• LAGOGEROS.
• Nick Nicholas over at ???ste???t?? (it's in English, honest!) has a post on a great piece of detective work he did to track down the meaning of ?a???, a Greek word used in Suda and in a gloss to Lucian;...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 18, 2009 08:07 PM



• COLD IRONING.
• Anybody here know what the post title means? You're wondering how you can iron a shirt with a cold iron, right? Boy, are you barking up the wrong tree. Here's a representative quote: "The Brooklyn Paper has an article on...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 14, 2009 08:32 PM



• NEWPORT NEWS.
• Another tidbit from George R. Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (p. 58):Also two brothers named Newce came there [to Virginia] to make a plantation. Once before, in Ireland, they had founded...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 20, 2009 08:54 PM



• MUFFIN.
• I am not referring to this kind of muffin (for a time I had apple-oat-bran muffins for breakfast every day, but that was another life) but to the nineteenth-century term meaning a poor baseball player, one who frequently muffs (misplays)...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 15, 2009 08:38 PM



• PREFACES TO THE OED FASCICLES.
• The OED has put online "the prefatory material that was published with the 125 fascicles, and the cumulated sections, parts, and volumes, in which the OED was originally issued between 1884 and 1928. These were collected in 1987 by Darrell...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 19, 2009 10:39 AM



• MALAY COOTIES.
• Jordan at Macvaysia has been wondering whether the English word cooties, which he defines as "an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids," might come from Malay kudis 'scabies' (Indonesian...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 6, 2009 05:46 PM



• NINE YARDS UPDATE.
• A couple of years ago I posted about an antedating of "the whole nine yards" to April 25, 1964. Now Fred R. Shapiro, in a Yale Alumni Magazine column, after summarizing the history of what he calls "the most prominent...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 20, 2009 12:52 PM



• GREY/GRAY.
• Conrad alerted me to the strikingly discursive OED etymology of the word they list as "grey, gray, a. and n." After a brief and boring account of its origin (it's from Old English gr??, and has only Germanic cognates), they...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 6, 2009 05:51 PM



• BECKWITH: MANCHU, ETC.
• I've only got a couple of chapters left in Beckwith (see my earlier posts: 1, 2), so I thought I'd pass along a few tidbits culled from what I've read so far, to give an idea of the kinds of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 5, 2009 05:21 PM



• SCARER.
• In the comments to this post, linguist and frequent commenter marie-lucie quoted an OED etymology that mentioned "Mongolian manul, formerly ‘watchman’, now ‘bird-scarer’" and said "I had never seen or heard 'bird-scarer'. Wouldn't "scarecrow" be the idiomatic word?" That seemed...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 21, 2009 07:27 PM



• MANDELSTEIN.
• Having finished the Ronen book, I'm trying to get through Nancy Pollak's Mandelstam the Reader before Wednesday, when I have to return them both; it's hard, because I keep investigating the detours she sends me off on (she studied with...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 20, 2009 04:21 PM



• OHEL ON AMERICAN DICTIONARIES.
• Continuing my exhilarated exploration of The Oxford History of English Lexicography, I would like to report on chapter 9, "Major American Dictionaries" by Sidney I. Landau. I thought I had a fairly good grasp of the subject, but I had...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 20, 2009 08:27 PM



• BIRD DICTIONARY.
• A few years ago I posted a link to Denis Lepage's Avibase, an amazingly comprehensive bird site ("containing over 4.5 million records about 10,000 species and 22,000 subspecies of birds, including distribution information, taxonomy, synonyms in several languages and more"),...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 18, 2009 07:23 PM



• OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY.
• The good people at Oxford UP sent me a review copy of The Oxford History of English Lexicography; they must have been pretty confident I'd like it, because it's an expensive two-volume set, and their confidence was not misplaced. This...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 8, 2009 09:23 PM



• MYSTERY.
• In the course of my Orphic studies, I had occasion to look up the origin of the word mystery, and on checking the OED discovered to my surprise (though I think I used to be aware of this, many years...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 21, 2009 05:00 PM



• SPATCHCOCK.
• This satisfyingly consonant-laden word has been in my vocabulary for years—it refers to a fowl prepared by splitting and grilling—and it was a surprise to me, when I was asked where it came from, not to find it in my...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 14, 2009 06:34 PM



• MARIGOT.
• As I said here, my wife and I are reading Life: A User's Manual, and we're enjoying it a lot even though we have to take on faith that all the seemingly unrelated bits and pieces will add up at...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 9, 2009 04:02 PM



• GAZEBO.
• I had always taken gazebo to be, in the OED's words, "a humorous formation on GAZE v., imitating Lat. futures like videbo ‘I shall see’ (cf. LAVABO)," but the OED goes on to say "but the early quots. suggest that...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 13, 2009 10:32 AM



• GAS, BLAS, AND DEGAS.
• I had known that J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644) invented the word gas based on Greek ??? 'chaos'—it makes sense if you know that in Dutch, the letter g is pronounced kh—but I had no idea he also created blas...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 18, 2008 08:00 PM



• MENTOR.
• I'm still reading David A. Bell's The First Total War, and in explaining his theory of how, paradoxically, the new concept that war was an aberration that could and should be eliminated led to the modern type of "total war"...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 13, 2008 08:07 PM



• SOME WORDS.
• Leafing through Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, I happened on the word standish "a stand for writing materials : inkstand." Well, that's an odd word, thought I, and turned to the OED, where I found it qualified as "Obs. exc. Hist. or...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 12, 2008 04:42 PM



• SEARCHING MAGAZINES ON GOOGLE.
• I don't normally update you all on the latest bells and whistles introduced by Google, but this is a huge addition to the material available for searching, and their announcement starts with an etymology, so how could I resist?The word...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 10, 2008 09:02 AM



• CHINESE TEXT PROJECT.
• This is one of those things that I hesitate to post because I figure anyone who can use it probably already knows about it, but I usually turn out to be wrong about that, so here it is (thanks to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 26, 2008 01:36 PM



• ATLAS OF TRUE NAMES.
• Via a NY Times "Lede" post (thanks, Bonnie!), I learned about the Atlas of True Names:The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World and Europe. For...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 23, 2008 02:36 PM



• AMATEUR LINGUISTICS.
• Andrey Zaliznyak, a Russian historical linguist, gave a talk last month "On professional and amateur linguistics" that can be read (in Russian) here (found via Anatoly). I recommend it to anyone who can read Russian; for those who can't, I'll...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 11, 2008 04:19 PM



• TWO ETYMOLOGIES.
• I recently ran across a Russian word unknown to me, ??? [mukhoyár], an obsolete term for a kind of cotton fabric mixed with silk or wool. It looks like a purely Slavic word, perhaps having something to do with ???...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 19, 2008 10:36 AM



• CRICKET.
• For many years, I had wanted to read C.L.R. James's famous Beyond a Boundary, to quote the blurbs on the back "the most important sports book of our time" (Warren Susman) and "a dazzling guide to all our contemporary games"...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 18, 2008 08:15 PM



• ANGLO-NORMAN DICTIONARY.
• The Anglo-Norman Dictionary was announced in the late 1940s and began publishing in 1979, the last fascicle coming out in 1994; Glanville Price in his review for The Modern Language Review said it "is likely to have a major impact...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2008 08:29 PM



• FEIJOA.
• A memorial post (in Russian) for Solzenitsyn (??? ? ???) over at Avva led with a quote from The First Circle that used the word ??? [feikhua], a variant of ??? [feikhóa] 'feijoa'; the translation was obvious, but (as often...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 4, 2008 11:23 AM



• CUIL.
• I had no intention of writing about the new search engine Cuil, pronounced "cool" (a quick visit did not impress me), but the name was taken from Irish, which is catnip to this erstwhile Indo-Europeanist with a deep attachment to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 30, 2008 09:04 AM



• BLUNDERINGLY.
• Apologies for a second post about lexographical trivia, but sometimes trawling through dictionaries is too much fun not to share. This time the word my eye lit on was lespedeza, "a genus ... of herbaceous or shrubby plants of the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2008 11:28 AM



• INDAGATE.
• I was looking up something else in Webster's when my eye fell on indagate:Etymology: Latin indagatus, past participle of indagare, from indago ring of hunters encircling game, act of searching, from Old Latin indu in + Latin agere to drive...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 18, 2008 03:25 PM



• SCAPEGOAT.
• I looked up scape 'plant stalk' (a word my wife and I learned at the Food Bank Farm, where they had garlic scapes), thinking it might have an interesting etymology; it didn't particularly (it's from Latin scapus 'shaft, stalk'), but...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 30, 2008 09:09 PM



• IE LOANWORDS IN FINNISH.
• The creator of Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish has done a splendid job. Mind you, I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of the etymologies, but they're very well presented, and the approach inspires confidence:The data...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 18, 2008 09:02 PM



• STAMINA.
• Another bout of idle wondering led me to look up the etymology of stamina; I suddenly realized it looked like the plural of stamen, but thought "that can't be right." As it turns out, it is, in an unexpected way....
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 31, 2008 08:18 PM



• SURLY, SIRLY.
• A remarkable etymology has been brought to my attention by the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org: "the word surly is no more than an alteration of sirly, which meant lordly, haughty, imperious, acting like a sir in fact." A couple of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 13, 2008 08:52 PM



• ARABIC BARRIO.
• I just discovered an etymology that surprised me: barrio, which the OED takes back only to "Sp. barrio district, suburb," is now considered to be, as AHD puts it, "Spanish, from Arabic barri, of an open area, from barr, open...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 28, 2008 08:59 PM



• TURAN IN WEST AFRICA.
• This Language Log post (by Mark Liberman) contains a bit of information in the Update that made me sit up and take notice. David Eddyshaw is quoted as writing: "The actual words for 'white man' [in West Africa] are interesting......
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 16, 2008 08:13 PM



• PROUST: THE SUMMING-UP.
• My wife and I unexpectedly finished Proust last night (I'd thought it would last another day) and sat up talking about it for a while, and now I'm going to try to organize my thoughts about the year-and-a-half-long experience and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 4, 2008 12:31 PM



• POLYGLOT CLEOPATRA.
• Still reading Ostler, I've come to a nice quote from Plutarch about Cleopatra:There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 28, 2008 08:14 PM



• ACROSS THE ALPHABET WITH OED UPDATES.
• Since the year 2000 the OED has been trudging its way through the alphabet (starting from M), revising as they go: "According to that model, the present publication batch would include words from quits to somewhere early in the letter...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 17, 2008 08:38 PM



• A CHORE IS AJAR.
• Another etymological adventure: I saw a reference to the fact that ajar was originally on char 'on the turn' (i.e., of a door, 'slightly opened'), and I thought I'd investigate this mysterious char. The OED lists it as "chare, char,"...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 3, 2008 01:22 PM



• WORDMALL.
• Another language-related blog has come to my attention: Michael Sheehan's Wordmall. Sheehan is a retired English professor who has a radio show called "Words to the Wise," which "covers the joys and vicissitudes of the English language," and he covers...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 28, 2008 09:14 AM



• TRADE WIND.
• Another interesting etymology: trade winds have nothing to do with trade in the sense of 'commerce,' though as the OED says "the importance of those winds to navigation led 18th c. etymologists (and perhaps even navigators) so to understand the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 18, 2008 06:14 PM



• TENDER.
• Today's etymology: tender 'a boat for communication or transportation between shore and a larger ship; a car attached to a steam locomotive for carrying a supply of fuel and water' is short for attender: it's a boat or train car...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 17, 2008 03:22 PM



• TIMES NOT LYING, JUST CARELESS.
• In response to this post, I received an e-mail from Pete Wells, Dining Editor of The New York Times, in which he quoted what he'd written to Bill Poser:Several readers have written us about this passage in a recent post...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 2, 2008 09:08 PM



• THE LYING TIMES.
• [Update. I'm giving the update its own post because it considerably changes the situation reported below, and it's only fair to make it prominent considering the hyperbolic outrage of the initial post. I hereby retract the excessive frothing and accusations...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 31, 2008 02:22 PM



• FION.
• I was listening to "Says You" (described here), and in the "guess the real definition" part the word was fion, which they pronounced FYE-on. The fake definitions involved subatomic particles, the real one was "A piece cut from a fish...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2008 02:50 PM



• BUFF.
• I was looking up something else in the OED when I happened on sense 6.b. of the entry buff, n.2 'A buffalo, or other large species of wild ox':‘An enthusiast about going to fires’ (Webster 1934); so called from the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 9, 2008 12:18 PM



• ANTEDATING EGGNOG.
• Heidi Harley says she is "not the kind of linguist who is heavy into antedating and sourcing," but she happened to run into a citation for eggnog that beat the OED's 1825 date and posted on Language Log about it:...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 24, 2007 08:32 PM



• UNEXPECTED CONNECTIONS.
• I just ran across the name of the late historian Kenneth Cmiel, and of course wanted to know how to pronounce it. A little googling turned up this page, which shows that the Polish pronunciation is (more or less) "chm(y)el,"...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 18, 2007 09:42 PM



• TWO BLOGS.
• I've been enjoying these, and I thought I should pass them along: Greater Blogazonia is subtitled "Language and Society in Greater Amazonia"; its creator, Lev Michael, says "My research focuses on Amazonian languages, and I am particularly interested in the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 14, 2007 08:54 PM



• DAIRY LADY.
• My wife was remarking on our cat Pushkin's excessive fondness for dairy products when I realized I didn't know the etymology of the word dairy. Not being one to accept such a state of affairs, I dashed off to consult...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 29, 2007 02:15 PM



• ETYMOLOGY IN PROUST.
• The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 8, 2007 06:07 PM



• BONIN ISLANDS ENGLISH.
• I'm in a mad deadline rush, but I wanted to point you towards a fascinating post at Far Outliers quoting English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long:It is a little known linguistic fact that among a group of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 28, 2007 11:18 AM



• ANTHIMERIA.
• Apparently there is a rhetorical term anthimeria meaning the use of a word as a different part of speech than its normal one, as in Calvin's "Verbing weirds language." (Hobbes's response: "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 15, 2007 11:26 AM



• JATROPHA.
• A story by Lydia Polgreen in today's NY Times discusses a plant used in Mali as a form of fencing that turns out to be "a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 9, 2007 12:10 PM



• COMPASS.
• The discussion of pair of stairs got onto the subject of compass(es), and after discovering there were three words in Russian (??? [kómpas] for 'instrument for determining direction,' ??? [bussól'] for 'surveyor's compass,' and ??? [tsírkul'] for 'instrument for describing...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 7, 2007 08:33 AM



• DINO.
• I was just looking up dinosaur in the AHD when my eye was caught by a photo of a graceful protozoan, Ceratium sp., illustrating the dinoflagellate entry. "Dinoflagellate?" I thought. "What's so scary about that little creature?" I looked at...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 5, 2007 02:02 PM



• CRY THE BELOVED FORUM.
• Weird etymology of the week: today I saw a reference to the verb cry being derived from an ancient Roman exclamation "Quirites!" '[Help,] citizens!' Outmoded folk etymology, thought I, but no, the OED agreed: [a. F. crie-r ...:—L. quiritare to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 2, 2007 09:39 PM



• XOC > SHARK?
• The comment thread on this post quickly mutated into a discussion of the etymology of the word shark; commenter dearieme quoted Michael D. Coe as saying "Tom Jones has recently proved that 'xoc' [in Maya] is the origin of the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2007 08:27 PM



• GAZPACHO.
• My friends Barbara and Holt have an excellent blog, What Holt and Barbara Had for Dinner, that should appeal to anyone interested in food and/or cooking; their latest post is about gazpacho, both the many ways of making it and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 9, 2007 02:16 PM



• VAMPIRES AND BORDERS.
• Yesterday I posted about the German word Handy; today, serendipitously, I have happened on another interesting etymology. I was reading about the history of vampires and wanted to find out where "Medvegia," the site of a famous early-18th-century case was,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 8, 2007 11:25 AM



• WOHER KOMMT DAS HANDY?
• Anatol Stefanowitsch in Bremer Sprachblog discusses the question Woher kommt das Handy?: where does the German word Handy 'mobile telephone, cell(ular) phone' come from? After rejecting various theories (such as that it's short for the 1940s term handie-talkie), the floor...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 7, 2007 08:46 PM



• MISCELLANY.
• 1. Inspired by this LH post, Joel of Far Outliers has posted a very useful summary of the history and uses of the Japanese kana syllabaries. 2. It turns out the word ramen does not have a firm etymology. Wikipedia:Though...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 1, 2007 10:07 AM



• AKON'S NAME.
• There is apparently a Senegalese-American hip-hop singer and producer named Akon (IPA pronunciation: /'e?.k?n/) who says his full name is Aliaune Damala Bouga Time Puru Nacka Lu Lu Lu Badara Akon Thiam. I haven't kept up with the pop music...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 25, 2007 09:01 PM



• MEH.
• The dismissive exclamation meh has been cropping up all over recently (see Ben Zimmer's Language Log post); it was popularized by The Simpsons, but it goes back before that, and Nathan Bierma has done a Chicago Tribune column on it...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 13, 2007 03:53 PM



• A LANGUAGE OF LOOSENED NECKTIES.
• I've finished Durrell but am still fascinated with Alexandria, so I'm reading Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman, a saga of his family's life in the city covering most of the twentieth century. It's apparently somewhat fictionalized, but...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 8, 2007 08:52 PM



• PARQUET, PARK.
• Still reading Durrell (and now almost done with Balthazar), I ran across the word parquet used in the French sense of 'prosecutor's office' and decided to look it up in the OED. Much to my surprise, it turns out to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 29, 2007 05:39 PM



• TRAPEZIUM/TRAPEZOID.
• Yet another Yank/Brit difference I never knew about. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why a cross-bar suspended by ropes for acrobatic purposes was called a trapeze. I went to the OED, which said "Prob. orig. applied to a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 28, 2007 09:10 AM



• PHILOPENA.
• As mentioned in the thread that wouldn't die (where even as we speak le Cimentier Martien is leading a dubious group of revelers in some sort of catered affair), I am reading Proust to my wife in the evenings, and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 10, 2007 11:09 AM



• CHUDDAR/CHADOR.
• My wife and I often do crossword puzzles in the evening, and recently we ran across the clue "chuddar." We thought it might be a misprint, but I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary (which happened to be...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 3, 2007 12:09 PM



• MOSCOW.
• A commenter on an earlier post suggested that the word Moscow (as opposed to Russian Moskva) is due to "the Germans hired by Peter the Great in the 1700's." This is not true—Moscow long predates Peter—but it's plausible enough, and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 20, 2007 09:02 AM



• PERSIAN ETYMOLOGY.
• Polyglot Vegetarian has another superb post, this one on the linguistic history of Persian ??? panir 'cheese,' which like many Persian words has spread throughout Western Asia (it will be familiar to many as the "paneer" of Indian restaurants). I...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 19, 2007 09:15 AM



• PINDOS.
• Looking up something else in my largest Russian-English dictionary, my eye lit on the entry ??? [pindós] m obs colloq pindos (term of abuse used by Russians of Greeks). I love ethnic slurs in foreign languages, so of course it...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 3, 2007 08:48 PM



• MAPO DOUFU.
• If you, like me, enjoy spicy foods, one of your favorite Chinese dishes is probably ??? mapo doufu 'Pock-marked Grandma's Bean Curd'; if, like me, you enjoy mixing food and etymology, you'll be as pleased as I was to discover...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 31, 2007 10:27 AM



• CRAZY SPACE NAMES.
• Robert Roy Britt discusses the "nomenclature wars" of astronomy at SPACE.com:You might be surprised to learn that the outskirts of the solar system are loaded with Plutinos, Centaurs, cubewanos and EKOs. Astronomers didn't even know this a decade ago. In...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 21, 2007 08:54 PM



• PORTOBELLO REDUX.
• The last time we discussed the word portobello 'mature cremino mushroom,' the etymology was unknown despite a plethora of suggestions. Well, it may still not be exactly known, but at least we have an authoritative hypothesis; MMcM of the brand-new...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 6, 2007 05:43 PM



• PINOCHET.
• I'm sure many of you have wondered, as I have, what the "correct" pronunciation of Pinochet's family name is. Well, Eric Bakovic has not only wondered, he's thoroughly researched it, and this post on Phonoloblog (a follow-up to his earlier...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 15, 2006 12:19 PM



• ARABIC ETYMOLOGY III.
• I have previously (I, II) lamented the absence of an Arabic etymological dictionary, and Andras Rajki very kindly wrote to inform me that he had put what he modestly describes as a "modest" one online. It may not be comprehensive,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 18, 2006 03:09 PM



• SNOOK.
• A couple of years ago I posted about a South African fish called snoek, the subject of a New Yorker article by Calvin Trillin about a man's obsession with it. That snoek is the Afrikaans descendent of Dutch snoek, which...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 12, 2006 06:36 PM



• PANCOAST.
• An occasional feature here at LH is Family Names With Surprising Etymologies (e.g., Janeway), and today's is Pancoast. When my nonagenarian mother-in-law mentioned that somebody she'd known seventy years ago was called that, I thought she might be misremembering, but...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 30, 2006 10:51 AM



• ANOTHER RANT ABOUT SAFIRE.
• It's been a while since I've gone after the affably ignorant William Safire and his weekly maunderings about language, but once again a remark of his is so dunderheaded that I have to point and scoff. Today's column is about...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 15, 2006 01:23 PM



• GRIOT.
• I'm as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don't have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 13, 2006 02:27 PM



• GEUDA.
• Last week's New Yorker has a Burkhard Bilger article called "The Path of Stones" about the gem industry in Madagascar. I was skimming through it when I hit a reference to "a low-grade sapphire known as geuda" that the Thais...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 4, 2006 04:18 PM



• WIKIMOLOGY.
• Yet another find from that eternal scavenger of the internet, aldiboronti (at Wordorigins): the full story of the creation of the term wiki, in the form of an exchange of letters between Ward Cunningham, coiner of the word; Patrick Taylor,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 27, 2006 09:13 AM



• POKOT/SUK.
• So I was scrolling through the latest OED update, looking up (as is my wont) any words that strike me, and one of them was Pokot. It rang a faint bell, and when I saw "A member of an East...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 14, 2006 08:56 AM



• COWCUMBER.
• A recent entry from Pepys Diary ended with this sentence: "This day Sir W. Batten tells me that Mr. Newburne (of whom the nick-word came up among us for "Arise Tom Newburne") is dead of eating Cowcoumbers, of which the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 24, 2006 09:10 AM



• SEROW.
• Another odd word for your delectation: serow, "any of several goatlike artiodactyl mammals (genus Capricornis) of eastern Asia that are usually rather dark and heavily built and some of which have distinct manes." Aside from the unusual name (it's pronounced...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 19, 2006 07:57 PM



• VINDALOO.
• I just discovered that vindaloo (the name of a curry I only recently dared try because of its reputation for extreme spiciness) is not of native Indian origin, but comes (according to Merriam-Webster, the OED having a similar but abbreviated...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 9, 2006 09:28 AM



• DA-SHIH.
• I'm reading (finally—I bought it 15 years ago!) Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, and she mentions that in the 8th century the Chinese called the Arabs Ta-shih (or Dashi in pinyin). Anybody know the etymology?...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 27, 2006 06:56 PM



• BAH.
• It's been a rough day, people. Oh, nothing serious, just the usual detritus of life. I woke up to find we couldn't get onto the internet; that sometimes happens, but usually it goes away in an hour or two. This...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 22, 2006 08:59 PM



• STOTTING AND PRONKING.
• Sally Thomason at Language Log has a post in which she describes how she came to learn the synonyms stot and pronk, both of which describe the "hilarious pogo-stick bounds" of mule-deer (and antelope, gazelles, and the like). The etymology...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 13, 2006 08:52 PM



• RUFF/REEVE.
• There are three fairly obscure words reeve in English; I was familiar with the first two, a noun for various officials (ranging from 'a local administrative agent of an Anglo-Saxon king' to 'the council president in some Canadian municipalities') and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 21, 2006 02:38 PM



• ISPOLATI!
• I just stumbled upon a truly remarkable etymology. I've finally gotten around to reading Pushkin's ??? ??? [Kapitanskaya dochka, "The Captain's Daughter"], one of those all-time classics I should have read several decades ago, and I've reached the brigand song...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 19, 2006 06:03 PM



• ONIONS.
• I imagine the name of C.T. Onions is familiar to many of my readers; he joined the staff of the OED in 1895 and became a full editor in 1914 (he wrote the final entry in the first edition, "zyxt...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 11, 2006 04:36 PM



• POK-TA-POK.
• Pok-ta-pok, according to the OED, is "the Maya name of the sacred ball game of Middle America, called tlachtli by the Aztecs, which was played on a court as a religious ritual. The object of the game was to knock...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 8, 2006 02:14 PM



• BO-VRIL.
• As an American, I've never actually had any experience with Bovril (and I can't say I have any desire to), but I certainly know the word. Imagine my surprise when I was leafing through the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 4, 2006 04:14 PM



• AIUVALASIT.
• My wife asked me about the surname Aiuvalasit, which she had just encountered in a list, and I drew a complete blank. Googling has [wrongly, apparently] convinced me that it's a Jewish name, but that's as far as I can...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 2, 2006 01:31 PM



• CHIN-CHIN.
• In the comments to my post on napoo, xiaolongnu mentioned the expression chin-chin, which I would have placed in the same WWI era and soldierly milieu (major raising glass of claret: "Chin-chin, old chap! Drink up, the Boche await!"); it...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 26, 2006 11:46 AM



• COMPANIONWAY.
• Companionway is one of those words I've seen from time to time and never bothered to look up; the general sense 'something you walk along on a ship' sufficed for my purposes. But in reading Jane Stevenson's The Winter Queen...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 23, 2006 12:14 PM



• DICTIONARY COIN.
• I had meant to post this when I saw it at Wordorigins.org, but now a correspondent has reminded me, so here it is: last year's 50 pence coin celebrating the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language....
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 2, 2006 10:38 PM



• BALASHON.
• Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective is a new site that looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. The blogger, who goes by DLC, says:An American in Israel investigates language - modern and classic Hebrew, slang, Yiddish, Aramaic,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 13, 2006 05:19 PM



• FOE.
• Dropping by The Tensor, I found a post about a new unit of measurement, the foe; as the Wikipedia entry says, "A foe is a unit of energy equal to 1044 joules." Naturally, my first thought was not "Man, that's...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 7, 2006 11:43 AM



• THE OXFORD ETYMOLOGIST.
• Oxford University Press has a blog that deals with all sorts of subjects, and they've just added a language column by etymologisst Anatoly Liberman: "His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here each Wednesday." His first post, Etymology...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 1, 2006 03:08 PM



• SAFIRE 1, COPYEDITORS 0.
• We here at Casa Languagehat believe in fairness to the point of gritted teeth, yea, unto the uttering of small yips of pain. Having twice this month (1, 2) spifflicated William Safire, the oft-erring language columnist of the New York...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2006 01:44 PM



• SPIFFLICATE.
• I just ran across a fine old slang word, spifflicate or spiflicate—the former spelling is preferred by the New Oxford American Dictionary, which defines it as 'treat roughly or severely; destroy,' the latter by the OED, which defines it more...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 20, 2006 11:25 AM



• BISHOPS AND BERBERS.
• Lameen Souag at Jabal al-Lughat posts infrequently, but it's always worth reading. Last month I meant to blog his post comparing the traditional (but probably erroneous) etymology of Istanbul 'usquuf, "bishop" in Arabic, which apparently derives from a Coptic reinterpretation...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2006 10:29 AM



• THE MULTIFARIOUS AUBERGINE.
• By popular demand (in this thread), I am discussing the various words for 'eggplant' (Solanum melongena, a comestible with a far wider variety of shapes and colors than most of us are aware of—there's a very nice photograph of "a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 16, 2006 07:06 PM



• DIXON: THE WORD FOR DOG.
• In a previous entry I promised a series of posts with excerpts from Dixon's Memoirs of a Field Worker, and since three commenters in that thread mentioned the story of the Mbabaram word for 'dog,' I think I'll start with...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 12, 2006 04:23 PM



• ABERDEVINE, EAVES.
• Two things that have nothing to do with one another; I figure those who don't know Russian can enjoy the strange bird name. 1) I visited OEDILF (The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, previously discussed here), and the Random...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 2, 2005 10:18 AM



• POLISH AND INDO-EUROPEAN.
• As part of his online Grammar of the Polish Language, Grzegorz Jagodzinski has a list of Polish etymologies, a table of numerals in some of the main IE languages, and a detailed discussion of the etymology of the Polish (and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 1, 2005 04:07 PM



• WHEN A LANGUAGE DIES.
• John Ross presses the claims of disappearing languages in When a Language Dies:Because just a few people speak most of the world's languages—4% of the world's people speak 96% of its languages—most linguistic systems are extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 28, 2005 10:22 AM



• ELVER AND ALBUM.
• Just a couple of words whose etymology I found interesting: 1) Elver 'a young eel' is a variant of eelfare 'the passage of young eels up a river; a brood of young eels'; the first OED citation shows nicely the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 15, 2005 02:06 PM



• GETTING RITE RIGHT.
• So I've been reading a book by James G. Cowan called The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition, and I've been putting up with balderdash like "This suggests that science has no way of answering problems posed by the spirit, however...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 4, 2005 07:01 PM



• BRATTICING/BARTIZAN.
• Last night my wife raised the question of how old brand names are (I guessed nineteenth-century, but if anyone has any good links on the subject, please share); in the course of looking up the word brand in the OED,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 30, 2005 05:52 PM



• KAPELYE AND KUCSMA.
• Frequent commenter zaelic, whose intimate knowledge of all sorts of byways of Eastern European, Jewish, Romany, and musical lore is the envy of everyone who values such things, especially me, was kind enough to send me a kucsma (pronounced KOOCH-ma)...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 29, 2005 01:29 PM



• MAGH AND MAJORAT.
• Two words that have nothing in common except that they're near each other alphabetically, they're so obscure they're not even in the big Webster's, and pronouncing them is no easy matter: Magh: "A member of the (largely Buddhist) people of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2005 03:33 PM



• SHEIDLOWER ON JOHNSON.
• Jesse Sheidlower has a piece in the current Bookforum on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language that is well worth reading. A snippet:The abundance and quality of the material are often overshadowed...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 8, 2005 04:59 PM



• PELIGNIAN.
• Looking up the word dives, divitis 'rich' (often contracted to dis, ditis) in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I found the etymology "Pelignian des, deti, cogn. w. DIVVS..." Pelignian was new to me; on investigation I learned that the Paeligni were...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 13, 2005 09:54 AM



• MEXICAN AND GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES.
• The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua maintains on its website the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos, containing Spanish definitions of words peculiar to Mexico, and the Diccionario geográfico universal, whose entries often give "local pronunciation" and the Spanish adjective derived from...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 29, 2005 06:01 PM



• SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN.
• Speculative Grammarian is "the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics," if they do say so themselves.We are nearing the end of our transition from the real world to online, and we have nearly completed...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 26, 2005 06:55 PM



• QUIPU.
• I had just started the article "Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest" by Nicholas Wade in today's NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: "They believe they may have decoded the first word - a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2005 11:05 AM



• UNKNOWN TO DICTIONARIES.
• A Language Log post by Mark Liberman introduces me to a very interesting word which he spells "dykes," meaning 'diagonal cutting pliers' ("as a tool term, dykes is always plural, like scissors"). Now, googling "diagonal cutting pliers, dykes" (without the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 16, 2005 04:20 PM



• MA, A SMALL BIRD.
• Another entry from Davidson I had to share:Gallimaufrey (gallimaufry, and other variant spellings), an obsolete culinary term, corresponding to the French word gallimaufré [actually galimafrée—LH], meaning a dish of odds and ends of food, a hodge-podge. The obscurity surrounding the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 14, 2005 02:46 PM



• SLEEPY CAROTID.
• I was looking up a different word in my Oxford Russian-English dictionary when I happened to notice the phrase sonnaya arteriya, defined as 'carotid artery.' Now, sonnyy means 'sleepy,' so sonnaya arteriya literally means 'sleepy artery,' and this suggested that...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 4, 2005 03:06 PM



• THEODOLITE.
• In my last entry the word theodolite cropped up in the OED's definition of circumferentor; I got curious about its etymology and looked it up, only to find:Origin unknown... The name, alike in the Latinized form theodelitus and the vernacular...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 11, 2005 08:57 PM



• LENGKUA/GALANGAL.
• I've recently begun reading Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (I suspect this won't be the last post to emerge therefrom), and I have a question about the word lengkua in the following passage from page 82:Tis then Mason and Dixon are...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 23, 2005 06:38 PM



• MARVIN.
• My wife and I were discussing the delightful character Marvin the Robot when she said "Marvin... what an odd name. Where is it from?" I didn't know, so I looked it up, and it turns out it's from the Welsh...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 11, 2005 11:17 AM



• BARBARIAN NAMES.
• In an effort to find out something about the Isaurians and their language (a vain effort, and if anybody knows anything beyond "warlike" and "unknown" I'd appreciate hearing about it) I ran across Vassil Karloukovski's Page, with its many Bulgarian-related...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 28, 2005 06:19 PM



• DIVAN.
• "Divan" is one of the most complicated words I know. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definitions:1. A long backless sofa, especially one set with pillows against a wall. 2. a. A counting room, tribunal, or public audience room...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 25, 2005 05:47 PM



• GOOGLE DEFINITIONS.
• Google has introduced yet another great feature:What's an "iwi"? What does "spiel" mean? Google Definitions is one example of how we work to make the world's information more accessible: ask us what a word means, and we'll try our best...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 7, 2005 10:39 AM



• ROMAN LASER.
• First, a story (from this Times piece by Ben Macintyre, which I found at Barista):But there is one Roman delicacy even Jamie Oliver, our own Apicius, could not bring back to life. Laserpithium was a North African herb of indescribable...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 30, 2005 02:16 PM



• HIGH-TECH DICTIONARY.
• The Business & High-Tech Dictionary Project is a promising new online lexicon:This project got its start with the realization that there are no web sites that focus on the etymology and usage of business and high-tech jargon terms. There are...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 27, 2005 05:21 PM



• CHUKAR.
• So I finally got a copy of the new 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, and in flipping through it I happened on the unfamiliar word chukar. It represents a rather handsome partridge, Alectoris chukar, but what caught my attention were...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 23, 2005 06:09 PM



• APOPHENIA.
• I've discovered an excellent new word, apophenia, described here:Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger)... According to Brugger, "The propensity to see connections between seemingly...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 22, 2005 06:25 PM



• HOOLIGAN.
• I knew the etymology of this word was disputed ("Hooley's gang"? the Irish name Hooligan? Houlihan?), but I hadn't realized how suddenly it sprang on the scene. The OED says "The word first appears in print in daily newspaper police-court...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 16, 2005 03:48 PM



• ETYMOLOGY FOR EVERYONE.
• A new book, Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone by Anatoly Liberman, should help dispel some myths about how words arise. Its publisher, Oxford University Press, says:Word Origins is the only guide to the science...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 16, 2005 02:09 PM



• JAPANESE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY.
• Matt of No-Sword has posted about the new Nihongogen Daijiten, the 'Big Dictionary of Japanese Etymology.' If I knew Japanese, I would definitely want this book, but I'm disappointed by Matt's description:The Nihongogen Daijiten is an attempt to solve or...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 15, 2005 08:27 PM



• SHARAWAGGI.
• A Wordorigins thread introduced me to an interesting word with a disputed etymology, sharawaggi (with g pronounced like j). The OED does not try to define it, sending the reader instead to the first citation, from 1685: SIR W. TEMPLE...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 27, 2005 07:52 PM



• LIMERENT.
• Lexicographer Erin McKean is a senior editor at OUP as well as editor of Verbatim, "the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson." Yesterday on Public Radio International's show "The Next Big Thing" she said she wanted to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 9, 2005 09:42 AM



• NARTS FOR CHRISTMAS.
• I got a number of excellent things for Christmas (including a Boris Barnet double feature I can't wait to see), but the one I want to babble about here is a gift from my lovely and generous wife: Nart Sagas...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 25, 2004 06:24 PM





• GRATICULE.
• I have just learned (via a MetaFilter post) the word graticule, which is obscure enough that it's not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The OED defines it thus:1. A design or plan divided into squares to facilitate its proportionate enlargement...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 11, 2004 07:12 PM



• PORTOBELLO.
• I've been familiar with (and enjoyed) the big, meaty mushrooms called portobello for years, and I had assumed that that was, well, their name. But I just read the entry in the invaluable Food Lover's Companion, which begins:An extremely large,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 8, 2004 08:20 PM



• NARTS.
• Having posted at MetaFilter about the ubiquitous legendary heroes of the North Caucasus, I thought I'd give the etymology (from John Colarusso's introduction to Nart Sagas from the Caucasus):These sagas are of interest not only in their own right as...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 4, 2004 10:30 PM



• RIP DAVID SHULMAN.
• Yesterday the NY Times had an obituary (by Douglas Martin) for a man I'd never heard of but who was well known to the editors of the OED:David Shulman, a self-described Sherlock Holmes of Americanisms who dug through obscure, often...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 8, 2004 06:34 PM



• BORING.
• Reading a NY Times Magazine article by Scott Anderson (reproduced here) about the dreadful situation in western Sudan, I was stopped in my tracks by the following sentence: "Pulling a stack of business cards from the pocket of his white...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 19, 2004 07:02 PM



• JAVELINA.
• Once again the NY Times has increased my vocabulary. A story about a small New Mexico town describes its current state of decay: "And these days, more animals than people can be found wandering the streets. Quail, javelinas and the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 26, 2004 06:21 PM



• SYNTAX IN BARDI.
• In the course of an explanation of site changes, Anggarrgoon presents a most interesting explanation of a bit of Bardi grammar:"look like" or "resemble" is irrganbala, it's a noun, it's inalienably possessed, it's (understandably) obligatorily plural. It is also one...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 26, 2004 01:53 PM



• BISHKEK/PISHPEK.
• A comment thread at pf has inspired me to deal with the vexed question of the various names for the capital of Kyrgyzstan. From 1926 to 1991 it was Frunze, which is not problematic (except for the Kyrgyz—see below), Frunze...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2004 02:06 PM



• WORDFUL.
• Wordful is a new language site from Australia whose creator says:Words. How I love 'em. This is where I'll share my love for word histories, names and anything else wordy that pops into my head.This is obviously a good premise...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 18, 2004 11:55 AM



• SNOEK AND SALOMI.
• I posted the following on Wordorigins yesterday:In a (delightful) New Yorker article focused mainly on a South African friend's quenchless craving for snoek ("He thinks about fried snoek and grilled snoek and dried snoek and snoek made into pâté..."), Calvin...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 9, 2004 01:55 PM



• KOONTZ ON SIOUXAN LANGUAGES.
• John Koontz, a linguist at the University of Colorado, has a website full of information about Siouan and Other Native American Languages, with a particularly interesting page about etymologies (including Kemosabe and Tonto, an entry that manages to cite both...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2004 02:21 PM



• ANGLO-FRENCH.
• I quickly weary of long theoretical treatises, but I never tire of reading detailed histories of the forms and usages of vocabulary items, and many such are available at W. Rothwell's Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub. I discovered this through a reference...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 5, 2004 04:58 PM



• SAUNTER.
• The word saunter, like many others, can't be traced back very far (AHD: Probably from Middle English santren, to muse), but of course that doesn't stop people from trying, and this word has a particularly enjoyable pseudo-etymology, discussed in the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 24, 2004 03:05 PM



• ETYMOLOGIC.
• The creators of Etymologic! call it "the toughest word game on the web," and for all I know they may be right.In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2004 10:08 PM



• PHILOLOGOS
• Once again aldiboronti, in his usual place of business at Wordorigins, comes up with a great link: the Philologos column at the Forward. Aldi cites the column on the Hebrew word for 'ladybug,' parat Moshe rabbenu (literally 'Moses' cow'), which...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 9, 2004 03:21 PM



• CARL RAKOSI.
• Seeing Michael Carlson's Guardian obituary of Carl Rakosi, who died June 25, linked at wood s lot reminded me that I somehow let his passing go unremarked here, and I thought I'd remedy that now. The first paragraph of the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 5, 2004 10:46 AM



• ETYMOLOGIE.
• Or, to give the site its full name, Etymologie, Etimología, Étymologie, Etimologia, Etymology, (griech.) etymología, (lat.) etymologia, (esper.) etimologio / __ Welt, World, Le Monde / Sprachen der Länder. It's a collection of language links, with descriptions in German or English, followed by a (very incomplete) list of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on July 2, 2004 10:26 PM



• ARABIC ETYMOLOGY II.
• An earlier entry lamented the fact that there is no Arabic etymological dictionary; a Russian LJ site picked up on this and a commenter provided the following list of alleged counterexamples:Murad Faraj Multaqay al-lughatayn al-`Ivriyah wa-`al-`Arabiyah [The unity of the...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 29, 2004 04:55 PM



• EYAS.
• A charming NY Times story by Melissa Sanford on the perilous flight training of urban falcons (the NY Times link generator won't give me a blogsafe link for some reason, so this link will rot in a week) says "It...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 28, 2004 02:39 PM



• ARABIC ETYMOLOGY.
• Frequent commenter Tatyana sent me a link to a Russian blog where there was a discussion of the Arabic word SiraaT 'path' (famously used in the first sura of the Qur'an, the Fatiha: Ihdina al-sirata al-mustaqima 'Show us the straight...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 25, 2004 09:51 AM



• NEOLOGISMS.
• Neologisms - a Dictionary of Findable Words and Phrases is just what it says.This website is being developed as a record of new and evolving words and phrases in the English language, with special reference to UK English usage. One...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 19, 2004 04:52 PM



• DICCIONARI.
• That's the Catalan word for 'dictionary,' and I've just discovered the wonderful Diccionari català-valencià-balear, where you can enter a Catalan word and get definition, pronunciation, and etymology with historical excursus, for example:TIBIDABO topon. Muntanya de 532 metres, situada al nord...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 14, 2004 04:38 PM



• TRANSLATION PROBLEMS.
• I've run into a couple of difficulties arising from my reading lately, and I thought I'd share them, since they affect more than the words in question. 1) This is what I think of as the "echelon" problem, because of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 26, 2004 12:29 PM



• MORE JAPANESE VERBING.
• Anyone who enjoyed my earlier post on the way Japanese conjugates verbs made from borrowed words, based on one at No-Sword, will want to read his new entry "More unusual Japanese verbs." One of his tidbits:gomakasu -- means "misrepresent (in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 21, 2004 08:04 PM



• MULTILINGUAL SPICES.
• Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages "present solid information on (currently) 117 different spice plants."Emphasis is on their usage in ethnic cuisines, particularly in Asia; furthermore, I discuss the history, chemical constituents and etymology of their names. Last but not least, there...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 5, 2004 03:34 PM



• Posted in languagehat.com on April 25, 2004 10:46 AM



• A BASTARD NAME.
• I ran across the following amusing etymology in California Place Names, by Erwin G. Gudde (pronounced "goody"):Coachella (ko-CHEL-a, ko-a-CHEL-a): Valley, town [Riverside Co.] ...Since shells could be found in the valley... Dr. Stephen Bowers called it Conchilla Valley in a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 4, 2004 05:22 PM



• RIVAL.
• Via the newly active riley dog (now relocated to the Yukon), I got to a clever three-part poem, "A Lesson" by Jeanne Marie Beaumont, whose first part, "Vocabulary," contains the lines:Sty and style are not related; neither are braid and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 3, 2004 04:17 PM



• MINIVET.
• I'm reading From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe (as is Joel of Far Outliers, who posts some good quotes from the early chapters), and I ran across an intriguing word on page 55:...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 31, 2004 04:07 PM



• BECS.
• Rereading a well-loved thread made me nostalgic for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which reminded me of one of my favorite bizarre toponymic equivalences: the Hungarian name for the capital of Austria, whose other names (Wien, Vienna, &c) derive from Latin Vindobona,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 13, 2004 07:45 AM



• BLOG ETYMOLOGY.
• Claire Bowern, in her shiny new blog Anggarrgoon ("Anggarrgoon is Bardi for 'on the web'. From time to time I'll rant about various linguistic things here"), has posted this intriguing entry:It's a little-known fact that Blog has an etymology in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 2, 2004 10:45 PM



• NYAMWEZI.
• As I make my way through Dalby's Dictionary of Languages, I run across all sorts of fascinating tidbits in the sidebars. In the entry for Sukuma, an important language of northern Tanzania, there is also information about its sister language...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 23, 2004 10:20 PM



• TRAVESTY.
• Want to generate your own gobbledygook? Try Adjunct Travesty, which "allows you to process an extract from Adjunct: an Undigest, and/or a text of your own choosing, through a text-generating algorithm modelled on the program TRAVESTY by Hugh Kenner and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 17, 2004 04:26 PM



• COLORIA.
• My friend Nick Jainschigg has sent me a link to a Finnish site, coloria.net, that appears to contain investigations of all sorts of color-related phenomena. I say "appears" because my Finnish is, sadly, nil; of course I have dictionaries (though...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 5, 2004 03:25 PM



• SAFIRE'S BOGEYMAN.
• This week's "On Language" column by the jovial and often clueless William Safire focuses mainly on the word bogeyman, alias boogeyman. Safire claims there's a transition from the latter to the former in progress; I think the latter is a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 3, 2004 04:36 PM



• BIOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE.
• Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature gives some of the weirder etymologies of species names: Aegrotocatellus Adrian and Edgecombe, 1995 (trilobite) Latin for "sick puppy". Brachyanax thelestrephones Evenhuis, 1981 (fly) The name translates from Greek to "little chief nipple twister". Campsicnemius charliechaplini...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2004 10:45 PM



• MISCELLANEA.
• 1. An excellent list of names for special characters, for example ! = "exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, potion&, not*+, dammit*" (in my proofreading days, we mostly said...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 18, 2004 01:57 PM



• THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING.
• One of my Christmas gifts was Simon Winchester's book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I am very much looking forward to reading. How can I resist a book whose acknowledgments include the line...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 25, 2003 09:03 PM



• WORDS.
• A couple of interesting words encountered while perusing the OED, the first remarkable for its etymology (lapwing has nothing to do with lap or wing) and the second because I hadn't realized (though it made sense once I thought about...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 11, 2003 04:45 PM



• SAMARRA.
• Mark Liberman asks a question that has often occurred to me as well: what is the proper (Iraqi) way to pronounce the name of the city Samarra? I've always said [s@m'ar@] (except in the name of the John O'Hara novel...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 1, 2003 01:34 PM



• CAVIAR.
• I was looking at the book Caviar by the delightfully named Inga Saffron when I was stopped cold by an excursus on the etymology of the word caviar. She found the OED's etymology boring and confusing:Of uncertain origin, found in...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 29, 2003 12:58 PM



• "THE" + PLACE NAME.
• I've just run across an interesting series of threads at LINGUIST List on the topic of place names with and without "the." It seems to have started with 3-892 (12 Nov 1992); I'll give the threads in sequence, with a...
• Posted in languagehat.com on November 25, 2003 02:56 PM



• YARDANG.
• I just came across a word new to me, namely yardang, 'a sharp, irregular ridge of sand or the like, lying in the direction of the prevailing wind in exposed desert regions and formed by erosion by the wind of...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 26, 2003 11:34 AM



• BEST LETTER EVER, OR MAT REVISITED.
• The mail section of the latest New Yorker is entirely taken up with responses to the recent Erofeyev article on mat. I will reproduce here what is, hands down, the best letter-to-the-editor I have ever read (from a Languagehat standpoint,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2003 06:43 PM



• HEROIC ETYMOLOGY.
• Marc Miyake over at Abode of Amritas has a post that goes into obsessive detail (just what I like) about the history and connections of the four characters that make up the Chinese name, Yingxiong shidai, of the forthcoming comic...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 19, 2003 11:57 AM



• PLANT NAMES AND POTENTIAL BLOGGERY.
• My friend C. writes:...it would be very satisfying to grow a collection of herbs just for their names, to wit: balm of Gilead (not used as a balm, and not native to Gilead); Texas mudbaby; pellitory-of-the-wall; brown radiant knapweed; gill-go-over-the-ground;...
• Posted in languagehat.com on September 2, 2003 03:03 PM



• FRENCH RESOURCES.
• Via the newly returned Grande Rousse (was she in the same province of Hiatus as Renee, I wonder?), a wide-ranging but spotty site on French language resources. Checking their book section under Etymology, I found several items that did not...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 27, 2003 11:16 AM



• BARNACLE.
• I was reading a TLS review of a book about Darwin's researches into barnacles (see, I told you I'd read anything, but you didn't believe me) and it occurred to me that I didn't know the etymology of the word...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 13, 2003 09:50 PM



• SOUK.
• Having recently posted about the AHD's extension of the etymology of "ginger" back to Dravidian, I am now equally delighted to have them trace "souk" back beyond the obvious Arabic to Aramaic shuqa 'street, market,' from Akkadian suqu 'street.' And...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 30, 2003 04:08 PM



• GINGER.
• I had known that the complicated etymology of the word "ginger" took it back to the Indian subcontinent; it's from Middle English gingivere, borrowed (like Old English gingifer, which may itself be a source of the Middle English word) from...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 28, 2003 09:22 PM



• CORNISH NAMES.
• I was curious about the origin of the name Chenoweth, and a quick Googling turned up the information that it was Cornish for 'new house.' I looked it up in my copy of T.F.G. Dexter's Cornish Names and there it...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 9, 2003 10:05 PM



• KOAN.
• The latest entry at The Discouraging Word, "The koan of the meshuggeneh," has this to say about the etymology of koan: "Koan comes straight from the Japanese, from ko, public, and an, variously defined by our usual dictionary sources as...
• Posted in languagehat.com on June 6, 2003 04:57 PM



• NEW WORDS.
• I've been turning my attention to the gorgeous illustrations in my new American Heritage Dictionary and in the process have acquired some new vocabulary items, which will stick with me better for having been learned with a visual reference; herewith...
• Posted in languagehat.com on May 2, 2003 10:34 PM



• MOTYHOLE.
• In my perusal of the OED, I have run across the most extreme example I've seen of disparity between the weight of scholarly apparatus brought to bear on a word and the fugitive nature of the word itself, which occurs...
• Posted in languagehat.com on April 20, 2003 01:04 PM



• DRAVIDIAN ETYMOLOGY ONLINE.
• In the course of perusing the glorious Guide to World Language Dictionaries recently posted, I have discovered that the magisterial (and expensive—I was once tempted to spend $40 for it at a used-book store) Dravidian Etymological Dictionary of Burrow and...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 15, 2003 08:21 PM



• WHY A DUCK?
• That's the title of William Safire's language column in today's Times Magazine, and it's the first one in a long time that not only eludes my carping but gladdens my heart. I can finally come clean and confess that not...
• Posted in languagehat.com on March 2, 2003 06:01 PM



• GREAT AND DEAR LEADERS.
• William Safire's column in today's NY Times Magazine has a useful discussion of the well-known bynames of the late Kim Il Song and his son and heir Kim Jong Il:In 1994, Kim Il Sung (Great Kim) died and was succeeded...
• Posted in languagehat.com on February 2, 2003 04:18 PM



• SIX MONTHS OF LANGUAGEHAT.
• It feels a little silly celebrating a semianniversary, but everybody knows blog years are like dog years. (However, a book cannot be blog-eared. But I digress.) I worked hard on my first post (wanting to avoid the "Testing... testing... hey,...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 31, 2003 04:01 PM



• POETRY/JAZZ BLOG.
• Wood s lot points me to Jonathan Mayhew's blog, which has been going since last September (and all of which is on a single page, so it takes a while to load: yo, Jonathan, how about showing a week at...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 24, 2003 11:38 AM



• BAD ETYMOLOGY.
• I'm used to seeing dubious or just plain wrong etymologies, both online and off-, and usually I just ignore them. This site, however, is so bad that I feel the need to give it a public thrashing. It purports to...
• Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2003 10:50 AM



• TIMES WATCH.
• In a silly article called "Suddenly, It's Easier to Find a Hero Than a Villain," Rick Lyman rehashes the ancient wheeze about how hard it is to find acceptable ethnic groups for a villain to belong to since the fall...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 22, 2002 04:51 PM



• THE PERFECT SQUELCH.
• Anton Sherwood cites a story about three Romanian gymnasts being banned by their federation for giving a nude performance in Japan: "The trio had 'tarnished the image of gymnastics' with their naked performance . . . in a DVD filmed...
• Posted in languagehat.com on December 19, 2002 05:09 PM



• JANEWAY.
• I happened upon the family name Janeway and vaguely wondered about it, as I have every time I've seen it. This time, for whatever reason, the vagueness sharpened into an immediate desire to know what the hell was going on....
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 18, 2002 12:40 PM



• DAVID FOSTER WALLACE DEMOLISHED.
• I was attacking DFW's long Harper's essay on usage in a comment on MeFi today, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got, and I finally couldn't resist letting him have it at length. Wallace's long, long...
• Posted in languagehat.com on August 12, 2002 11:57 PM

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Language Blogs
Top 100 Language Blogs

Top 100 Language Blogs - Nominated blogs for Language Professionals

• •(Not Just) Another Translator - About professional translations (English & Italian to French Translations). (English/French)
• •Schplock - German studies student blogs about languages and linguistics. (German)
• •A Arte da Tradução - Translation in Portuguese. (Portuguese)
• •About Translation - Information, news and opinions about professional translation. (English)
• •Ad maiorem interpret(ation)is gloriam - On the art of translation - a blog by a medical interpreter (Polish)
• •Algo más que traducir - Personal page of a translator with lots of resources. (Spanish)
• •An A-Z on ELT - Articles relating to existing entries, or with a view to creating new entries from the book “An A-Z of ELT” - an encyclopedia-dictionary of terminology relating to English language and English language teaching. (English)
• •Ana Scatena - A professional translator writes about language and teaching. (Portuguese)
• •Anthro-Ling - Devoted to Anthropology, Archaeology, Language and Linguistics, Culture. (English)
• •Anyword - French Blog on Translation. (French)
• •Applied Language - High Quality Language Solutions, delivered on time …with a smile! (English)
• •ArabLing - Arabic Linguistics. (German)
• •ATAA - The Blog of ‘Ata , it is the latest industry news of audiovisual translation, association, words of translators on their jobs, their small pleasures and their rants. (English)
• •Atominium the art of translation - Hints on Translations & Translators & Culture & CAT & IT & Technology (Polish)
• •ATR Blog - It contains over 250 posts: news, events articles, recommendations in Romanian and several other languages, as well as surveys, quotations for translators, interpreters and other language professionals. (Romanian)
• •Begona Martínez - Transtlation and interpretation in Spanish. (Spanish)
• •Beyond Words - Beyond Words is ALTA Language Services’ blog, wherein ALTA’s language professionals comment on issues involving translation, interpreting, language testing, and the intersection of language with current events. Beyond Words aims to be a fun resource for language lovers and professionals. (English)
• •Blog de Traducción: Trusted Translations - Aquí encontrará consejos, recomendaciones y todo tipo de información, tanto para traductores como para compradores de traducciones mediante artículos redactados por todos los que participamos en la apasionante actividad de la traducción profesional. (Spanish)
• •Blog on translation - Blog on translation. (English)
• •Blogging Translator - Translation and Linguistics. A blog covering general topics on translation. (English)
• •Blogging with Swedish Translation Services - Swedish Translation Services is a company owned by Tess Whitty, a freelance translator (English-Swedish), proofreader, editor, copy writer, localizer and entrepreneur. (English)
• •Brave New Words - A blog about translation, language, literature, and other related topics. (English)
• •Building Rapport - Advocating plain language, clear design, sensitivity to audience concerns, and civility. (English)
• •Crosslingo’s Posterous - A translator, an English teacher, a reader and a blogger (English)
• •DCblog - English language blog. (English)
• •Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog - English language blog. (English)
• •Dylematy filolozki - Blog about Polish - language problems, spelling mistakes and other mysteries of Polish language. (Problemy jezykowe, bledy ortograficzne, zagadki polonistyczne…) (Polish)
• •English, Jack - Second thoughts on English and how she’s taught. (English)
• •Euro London’s Blog - The specialists in multilingual recruitment (English)
• •Evolving English II - In this blog, we observe the language changing all around us. (English)
• •Freelance Chinese translator - Professional English to Chinese translation and Chinese to English translation. (English)
• •Fritinancy - Names, brands, writing, and the quirks of the English language. (English)
• •Games with words - Blog that runs experiments through the Web testing human reasoning, particularly in the domain of language. (English)
• •Il blog del Mestiere di scrivere - Italian Blog. (Italian)
• •In parole povere - Thoughts and notes on the Italian language. (Italian)
• •ISEL - Blog jezykowy - Blog about English vocabulary and grammar. (Polish)
• •JodyByrne.com - Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany is blog written by a professional translator and translator trainer and it covers everything and anything to do with translation, localisation, languages, language technologies and research and often presents a humorous take on different topics. (English)
• •John Wells’s phonetic blog - Blog on everything to do with phonetics; from application to education to resources. (English)
• •Ken Wilson’s Blog - The original idea for the blog was, and remains, to provide free materials for teachers. (English)
• •L10NBRIDGE Translation blog - The blog posts cover everything from web globalization, translation FAQs, Internationalization, writing for localization, multilingual social media to favorite recipes throughout the world. (English)
• •Lavori in corso - Note pratiche in corso d’opera. (Italian)
• •Les recettes du traducteur - Tous les ingrédients pour faire boullir la marmite… (French)
• •Lingformat - The science of linguistics in the news. (English)
• •Linguistic Mystic - A place for me to post the things that intrigue me, but also as a place for you to find and learn about things that might intrigue you. (English)
• •Linneas språkblogg - A blog about things that have to do with the Swedish language in one way or another. (Swedish)
• •Literal-Minded - Linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally. (English)
• •Lux Lingua’s Blog - Thought on language, translation and the translator. (English)
• •MA Translation Studies News - A blog for students and graduates of the MA Translation Studies at the University of Portsmouth (English)
• •Medical Translation Blog - Medical Translation * Regulations * Technology. (English)
• •Motivated Grammar - Prescriptivism Must Die! (English)
• •Mox’s blog - Electromechanical Engineer and English-French to Spanish translator. (English)
• •Multimanus - A blog by a writing coach. Lots of great tips for writing and getting published. (Swedish)
• •Musings from an overworked translator - Musings from an overworked translator features musings about Jill’s life and the translation industry that are of interest to long-time translators as well as those new to the profession. (English)
• •Naked Translations - Reflections on words, expressions and the difficulties encountered on the bridge from the English to the French language. (English)
• •No Peanuts! - Provides support and resources to professional translators and interpreters in demanding and receiving a living wage for their work. (English)
• •Noncompositional - Noncompositional is a mostly-academic blog by a linguistics graduate student. (English)
• •Nordic Voices in Translation - Nordic Voices in Translation is a blog devoted to the English translation of the literatures of the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden - and also Estonia. (English)
• •Orden runt med Ann Ljungberg - Tips and ideas for people who want to write in Swedish. (Swedish)
• •Oversetter - Blog by Nick Rosenthal, Managing Director of Salford Translations Ltd. (English)
• •Paleoglot - Ancient languages, cultures and civilizations. (English)
• •Peter Harvey, linguist - Teacher, writer, translator. (English)
• •PHONOBLOG - All things about phonology. (English)
• •Plsh Text Communications - Helps you reach, speak to, communicate with, and build relationships with a variety of customers and consumers in various industries. (English)
• •Polyglot Blog - Resources and information about translation, interpreting and languages. (English)
• •Polysyllabic - Ruminations on grammar, philology and anything else. (English)
• •Power of Dream, Power of English - Helping learning English language and American culture. (Japanese)
• •Practicing Writing - Here you’ll find updates on writing and publishing opportunities (especially handy between issues of our monthly newsletter). Plus, the blog holds this practicing writer’s occasional observations on happenings in the literary world, book reviews, and news about her own work. (English)
• •Pratbubblor - Språkkonsulterna (the Language Consultants) brings you informational and inspirational musings on language. (Swedish)
• •Premere il tasto ANY - Riflessioni sulle traduzioni professionali in ambito informatico. (Italian)
• •Sauvage noble - An Austronesian’s Adventures in Altertumswissenschaft and Indogermanistik. (English)
• •Semantics etc. - A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof. (English)
• •Sentence First - An Irishman’s blog about the English language. (English)
• •Sinosplice - Blog to help understand all things China. Includes articles on language, culture and everything inbetween. (English)
• •Skrivtips - Tips for writing in Swedish. (Swedish)
• •Spanish Translation Blog - Blog on translation. In English (English)
• •Spanish Translation Blog (Spanish) - Blog on translation. In Spanish (Spanish)
• •Språkförsvaret - A blog in defence of the Swedish language with the hopes of elliminating the intrusion of English. (Swedish)
• •Språkpolis - The Swedish language police. (Swedish)
• •TecnoTraduBlog - Un traductor también puede ser geek. (Spanish)
• •Terminologia etc. - An Italian blog on terminology, translation, localization and language-related quirks. (Italian)
• •The Biolinguistics Blog - Brings a variety of material pertaining to the field of biolinguistics. (English)
• •The Engine Room - Blog about language use, publishing and the media in general. (English)
• •The Grammaphobia Blog - Q and A blog on grammar. Readers questions on use of English are answered and discussed on a daily basis. (English)
• •The Greener Word - German-English translator specialising in environmental issues and waste management in particular. (English)
• •The Language Guy - Commentary on how language is used and abused in advertising, politics, the law, and other areas of public life. (English)
• •The Name Inspector - English language blog. (English)
• •The POLSKI blog - The POLSKI blog is written by Michal, a Polish journalist, writer, one-time language teacher and linguist, living and working in London. (English)
• •The Shifted Librarian - Library related materials. (English)
• •The Translation and Interpretation Blog - This site facilitates knowledge and research in medical and legal translation and interpretation. (English)
• •There’s Something About Translation - A freelance translator blogs about lessons learned at the wordface, her experiences as a freelancer and the changes facing the profession. (English)
• •Thoughts On Translation - The translation industry and becoming a translator. (English)
• •Three Percent - Blog with articles on various topics related to translation, communication, technology and other snippets of random, unrelated informational debris. (English)
• •Tomedes - Smart Human Translation Services. (English)
• •Trad Online - Trad Online, a dynamic and innovative translation agency (French)
• •Tradeona - About translations. Being a translator is certainly a trade, but it is mostly an opportunity for the author to exercise her passion every day. (French)
• •Traduction anglais-français - The entente cordiale between English and French: translation tips, general culture, musings of someone who has already written two dictionaries, and much more - check us out (French)
• •Transblawg - Weblog from Fürth on German-English legal translation (German/English)
• •Translate This! - Strategies for Lossless Langage Convrson. (English)
• •Translating is an Art - A weblog about translation and language. (English)
• •Translation Blog: Trusted Translations - You will find tips, advice, and all kinds of information both for translators and translation buyers written by all those involved in the exciting field of professional translation. (English)
• •Translation Notes - News, ideas, tools to make translation more productive and enjoyable. (Spanish)
• •Translation Times - The translating twins and entrepreneurial linguists, Judy and Dagmar Jenner, blog about the business of translation from Vienna and Vegas. The blog revolves on ideas and strategies to run a translation business more effectively and efficiently by thinking like an entrepreneur. They dispense useful tips on marketing, advertising, entrepreneurship, real-life economics, pricing, and working with direct clients. (English)
• •Translator Power - Blog on translation. (English)
• •Translator’s Musings - Share the horror stories, the near misses and the tips for all those requiring translations from English to French. (English)
• •transubstantiation - Ideas on translation. (English)
• •Translation Guy - The challenges of language remain eternal, but the business of translation is changing in interesting and scary ways. Translation Guy is a way to get a handle on the transformation of translation for me and my readers. (English)
• •Trovare X Credere - Blog dedicated to the techniques and tools of research (and not only) for translators and interpreters. (Italian)
• •Über Setzer Logbuch - German blog on language, Russian and translation. Includes articles on the latest news on related areas. (German)
• •Wasaty tlumacz O tlumaczeniach przy fajce i kawie - Tips and tricks, toys and tools - everything about translation. (Polish)
• •wéb-tränslatiôns - The Web-Translations blog is a mixture of informative, serious, and light-hearted content focusing on various areas of language and the localization industry. All members of staff within the company are welcome to contribute, and we encourage comment from our readers - sometimes a real debate is opened, which is great! (English)
• •Word Routes - Ben Zimmer, executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and “On Language” columnist for The New York Times, explores the pathways of our lexicon in his Visual Thesaurus column, Word Routes. (English)
• •word spy - Word Lover’s Guide to New Words - Word Spy is devoted to “lexpionage,” the sleuthing of new words and phrases. (English)
• •Wordlustitude - This is a growing dictionary of ephemeral words, also known as nonce or stunt words. All readers are strongly encouraged to use these terms in their blogs, poems, prophesies, and recipes (English)
• •Wordmall - A blog about the English language. (English)
• •Words to good effect - Blog about writing, web content, usability, accessibility, language and translating. (English)
• •Wörter Blog - Blog on how to use German words and grammar correctly. (German)
• •Wortistik - A German publicist in his function as word custodian of the nation. (German)
• •Wunderland Deutsch - A declaration of love for the German language. (German)
• •yndigo - Blog on translation with both insights and incites. Covers many aspects of translation. (English)

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Logger, loggerheads, at loggerheads (W3)

"Logger" is an archaic English dialect word meaning a heavy block of wood, especially one attached to the leg of a horse to prevent it from wandering away. Shakespeare used "loggerhead" in 1588 the same way we would use "blockhead" ("Dummkopf") today, to mean an extremely stupid person, and it's possible that the phrase "to be at loggerheads" simply arose as a way of saying that people who get involved in long, stubborn arguments must be idiots.

Other sources suggests that the origin is nautical. Loggerheads were long handled devices with a spherical cup at one end. These cups were filled with hot tar or pitch which was thrown at enemy sailors. They, of course, responded and both sides were truly at loggerheads.

There is yet another nautical suggestion, this time involving whale boats. In these boats the loggerhead was a channel through which ran the harpoon rope. The channel became very hot when the rope was running out; it had to be cooled with water. The heat generated was likened to that found when people argue.
(adapted from Dr James Briggs)

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Weblog-Glossary

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A weekly podcast about words, language and why we say the things we do

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LanguageLog

Archives [+/-]

April 2010 - April 2008

About

Language Log was started in the summer of 2003 by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. For nearly five years, it ran on the same elderly linux box, with the same 2003-era blogging software, sitting in a dusty corner of a group office at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Other more or less regular contributors include Arnold Zwicky, Benjamin Zimmer, Bill Poser, Heidi Harley, Roger Shuy, Geoff Nunberg, Eric Bakovic, Sally Thomason, Barbara Partee, and John McWhorter. And an additional cast of dozens have blogged here from time to time.

On April 5, 2008, the original server suffered a terminal illness, and was replaced by a new machine in an actual server room with professional support, thanks to Chris Cieri, Chad Jackson and others at the Linguistic Data Consortium. The blog posts between 7/28/2003 and 4/6/2008, in the ugly but beloved old format, can be found here.

Archives:

April 2008 - July 2003

Search Results

• Divergent histories of languages and genesFebruary 21, 2010 @ 8:29 am · Filed under Linguistic history
• Charles Darwin saw the history of languages as a model for "descent with modification" in biological evolution; and researchers from Thomas Jefferson to Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and beyond have been excited about the idea of combining linguistic, biological, and geographical evidence to shed light on the history of human populations.
• Most recent linguists and anthropologists who […]
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• Naming people after godsDecember 10, 2009 @ 12:57 am · Filed under Language and culture
• Carol Hills, from The World, wrote to ask about historical and cultural differences in the use of religious names. Why, for example, is Jesus widely used as a personal name in Spanish-speaking countries but not in other traditionally Catholic areas? Among Hindus, Carol observes, some names of gods seem to be widely used as personal […]
• Permalink Comments (193)



• How NOT to Learn Chinese CharactersOctober 14, 2009 @ 2:29 pm · Filed under Writing Systems
• There are many ways NOT to learn Chinese characters, but one that I just found out about today is probably the worst, even worse than T. K. Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzles. It was written by Alison Matthews ("a statistician who has worked in the oil, aviation, tourism, medical and software industries") and Laurence Matthews […]
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• God speed the plowOctober 4, 2009 @ 8:06 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• A recent xkcd:
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• Kingsoft Strikes AgainSeptember 23, 2009 @ 4:40 pm · Filed under Lost in Translation
• Yesterday, I received this message from a young person who has been corresponding with me about ancient DNA and the movements of peoples across Eurasia during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age:
• The police reaved my computer due to I reprinted a news report of US about the National Day of China yesterday. I came […]
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• Malaysian MultilingualismSeptember 11, 2009 @ 3:52 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• Yilise Lin kindly called my attention to this article entitled "is hokkien my mother tongue?" (Hokkien consists of a number of topolects belonging to the Southern Min branch of Sinitic. They are spoken in Taiwan and in parts of the province of Fujian [on the southeast coast of China], and widely throughout Southeast Asia by […]
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• Quadrilingual Washlet InstructionsAugust 22, 2009 @ 10:30 am · Filed under Lost in Translation
• Half an hour before touchdown at Narita, the pilot turns on the "fasten seat belt" sign. Because something (or some things) served during the in-flight meals on the 14-hour flight did not quite agree with your alimentary tract, you are already experiencing ominous rumblings down in your bowels.
• You do your best to ignore the bouncing […]
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• Think B4 You SpeakAugust 18, 2009 @ 9:03 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• According to Tycho at Penny Arcade ("The True Face of Our Enemy", 8/17/2009)
• The Think B4 You Speak campaign is basically incoherent, and operates from some deep misconceptions about how and why people communicate. These assertions have been collated and placed sequentially in today's comic offering
• The strip in question:
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• The crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope, de-SinicizedMarch 7, 2009 @ 4:17 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• It's been a while since we've seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." A simpler variation removes the "danger," suggesting that the Chinese character (or word) for "crisis" is the same as […]
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• Mark Halpern on Language LogFebruary 22, 2009 @ 2:22 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• Yesterday afternoon, Mark Halpern sent me a response to last week's discussion of his book Language and Human Nature in the post "Progess and its enemies", 2/16/2009. It's presented below as a guest post, after the usual transformation from MS Word to html. (I take responsibility for any format or font errors that may have […]
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• Progress and its enemiesFebruary 16, 2009 @ 10:08 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com specializes in quantitative modeling of political trends, but yesterday he posted a terminological discussion of political philosophy, "The Two Progressivisms", distinguishing what he calls Rational Progessivism from what he calls Radical Progressivism. This reminded me of something that I noticed recently in reading Mark Halpern's book Language and Human Nature, namely […]
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• No word for lying?January 31, 2009 @ 1:57 am · Filed under Words words words
• I don't know about the languages that Montaigne was thinking of, but the claim that some languages lack a word for lying is one that has continued to crop up. A few months ago Steven Point, who is currently the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, asserted that there is no word for "lying" in his […]
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• The error in Obama's inauguration speechJanuary 20, 2009 @ 1:31 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• President Obama's inauguration speech contains an error that may well be of linguistic origin. He said: "Forty-four Americans have now taken the Presidential oath". That is false. Obama is the 43d American to take the Presidential oath. Obama's slip is probably due to the fact that he is accounted the 44th President.
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• Between libretto and liceJanuary 13, 2009 @ 5:26 pm · Filed under Words words words
• In connection with my difficult work on Language Log's "Financial Good News" desk, where things have been arduous and slow, I was looking something up in the American Heritage Dictionary earlier today (possibly liberalism, possible lien; to tell you the truth, I have forgotten what - something beginning with L, but I got sidetracked), when […]
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• Seven fishesDecember 26, 2008 @ 7:11 am · Filed under Language and culture
• On Christmas eve we went to Abbraccio with some friends for the festa dei sette pesci. This was our second seven-fish feast of 2008, since some other friends had their traditionally non-traditional big-party version last Saturday. Over the years, I've heard several different explanations for the fish and for the number, and a quick internet […]
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• Marketing Dreck?December 8, 2008 @ 11:46 am · Filed under Language and advertising
• In a series of comments on a recent post, Stephen Jones observed that "The Iranians have a detergent called 'Barf'"; and Language Hat explained that "That would be because barf is the Farsi word for 'snow'"; and Merri added this:
• Speaking of modified brand names, this is a good place to recall that the washing stuff […]
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• Atlas of True(?) NamesNovember 22, 2008 @ 2:06 am · Filed under Linguistic history, Lost in Translation, Names
• As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots. It's a very clever idea, but in execution it enshrines some questionable notions of "truth."
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• Sarah Palin's Favorite MealOctober 26, 2008 @ 7:06 pm · Filed under Words words words
• John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has not been without controversy, but I think that we can all agree that one way in which it has been a good thing is that it has increased the visibility of the important topic of moose, which in burger form is reportedly her favorite […]
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• Derivation by deletion of punctuationOctober 10, 2008 @ 10:49 pm · Filed under Linguistic history, Names
• There's a little lake near here called Sob Lake. I only recently learned the etymology of this name. According to Akrigg and Akrigg's British Columbia Place Names, the lake was originally named by a survey party. Finding the homesteader who lived nearby obnoxious, they recorded their opinion of him by naming the lake "S.O.B. Lake". […]
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• On the DotOctober 5, 2008 @ 12:52 pm · Filed under Punctuation
• This is a bit late for National Punctuation Day (September 24), but the book wasn't published until October 2: On the Dot: The Speck that Changed the World, by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez (Oxford University Press). It's a celebration of the dot ("the smallest meaningful symbol that one can make with ink from a […]
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• Pinker on Palin's "nucular"October 5, 2008 @ 2:48 am · Filed under Language and politics, Uncategorized
• In an op-ed in Saturday's New York Times, Steve Pinker tries to explain or extenuate some of Sarah Palin's linguistic derelictions, real and alleged. Among other things, he says that Palin shouldn't be taxed for saying "nucular," which is
• …not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s […]
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• The Opacity and Difficulty of the Chinese ScriptSeptember 18, 2008 @ 12:09 pm · Filed under Writing Systems
• My class on the Chinese script has around 36 students in it. About half of them are native speakers from Taiwan, the Mainland, Singapore, and Hong Kong (most of these are graduate students who already have M.A.'s from overseas universities or are finishing up their Ph.D.'s). About one quarter of the other students are native […]
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• 8/8/8August 8, 2008 @ 1:29 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• Inspired by Geoffrey Pullum's plan to take Barbara her matutinal coffee at exactly 08:08:08 on the morning of 08/08/08, this morning at 08:08:08 a.m. I took 8 photographs of my wife standing next to our favorite orchid, which has had a total of 8 blossoms.
• Yes, everything is coming up 8's today. The morning […]
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• CuilJuly 29, 2008 @ 8:16 am · Filed under HLT, Humor
• This speaks for itself, I think - the first referral from the new Cuil search engine that I've noticed in our referrer logs:
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• Dare to be bilingualJuly 14, 2008 @ 6:40 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• This is a follow-up on my Language devaluation and Pushing buttons posts from last Monday, and coincidentally also a follow-up on (the first comment on) Bill Poser's Obama's Indonesian post from Friday.
• I had promised in the Language devaluation post that I would (when I found the time) collect arguments for why English should not be […]
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• Querkopf von Klubstick returnsJune 10, 2008 @ 9:11 am · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• Yesterday, a correspondent I'll identify as "Kevin S" sent me a left-handed compliment:
• Someone recommended your posts on Language Log as an instance where I might encounter a rational form of Descriptivism. I must admit, you do generally write well, and your "mask of sanity" appears firm. It doesn't take long, however, before the mask […]
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• "Chad" back in the newsMay 30, 2008 @ 2:35 pm · Filed under Language and politics, Syntax, Words words words
• Most of us haven't thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. The word dominated the news so much back then that the American Dialect Society anointed it Word of the Year. But now the HBO docudrama Recount has brought back memories of chad - taking us back to the […]
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• ContaminationMay 10, 2008 @ 2:25 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• From the annals of incorrection: cases where, because of some structural similarity between constructions C1 and C2, some people see C1 (incorrectly) as an instance of C2, where C2 is believed (incorrectly) to be non-standard (or defective in some other way), so that these people avoid C2 and replace it by something else. The proscription […]
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• Another Appropriate NameMay 6, 2008 @ 2:29 pm · Filed under Names
• In 1958 a Virginia couple were rousted from their bed in the middle of the night by a county sheriff, arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime of miscegenation, for which they were sentenced to a year in jail. With the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, they appealed the conviction all the way […]

Search Results

• 40 words for "next"April 2, 2010 @ 11:34 pm · Filed under Ignorance of Linguistics, Language and advertising, Snowclones
• This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the "marketing innovations agency" Ignited:
• Integrated Copywriter/Etymologist
• Sure, the Eskimos have 40 words for “snow,” but Ignited has 40 words for “next.” That’s because we’re kind of obsessed with what’s next, whether that be in technology or media or Eskimo etymology. If you’ve got […]
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• What's the Male Brain made of?March 25, 2010 @ 12:54 pm · Filed under Language and gender
• The cover of Louann Brizendine's new book The Male Brain is puzzling.
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• How Language Log helped jump-start a subcultureMarch 24, 2010 @ 1:07 pm · Filed under Language in the movies
• Arika Okrent, author of the wonderful book In the Land of Invented Languages, has a new article on Slate about the burgeoning community of Avatar fans who have become obsessed with the movie's alien language, Na'vi. Before the movie was released, I had gotten to know the creator of the language, Paul Frommer, for a […]
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• Why I disprefer The Dictionary of Disagreeable English to pretty near anythingMarch 15, 2010 @ 10:19 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• I recently used the word disprefer in an email, and my spellchecker objected. That led me to a web search that convinced me that disprefer is (1) widely used in linguistics, (2) not listed in the OED, American Heritage, or Merriam-Webster online dictionaries, and (3) abhorred by some prescriptivists. This post is about to […]
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• Chinese Endangered by English?March 15, 2010 @ 3:39 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• In an article by Malcolm Moore entitled "Chinese language 'damaged by invasion of English words'" published this morning in the Telegraph, a Chinese official expresses grave concern at the invasion of English words in his nation's language.
• Huang Youyi, chairman of the International Federation of Translators, makes this alarming prediction: "If we […]
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• Where is *gaggig?March 3, 2010 @ 11:54 am · Filed under Phonetics and phonology, Words words words
• My preliminary experiments with dictionary searching suggest that English has absolutely no words with roots of forms like *bobbib, *papoop, *tettit, *doded, *keckick, *gaggig, *mimmom, *naneen, *faffiff, *sussis, etc. These are simple CVCVC shapes that do not seem to contain any un-English sequence. They aren't hard to say. In fact there is […]
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• Language Log asks you again: another quizFebruary 28, 2010 @ 5:20 pm · Filed under Quizzes
• What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations?
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• The Romantic Side of Familiar WordsFebruary 26, 2010 @ 5:29 pm · Filed under Language and culture, Language and gender, Language attitudes, Prosody
• I'm still noodling over Grant Barrett's "On Language" column in the New York Times the week before last, which tracked the recurring claim that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in English. It was a model of dogged word-sleuthing, which took us from George Jean Nathan to Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer and Donnie Darko […]
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• SnowclonegateFebruary 2, 2010 @ 6:52 am · Filed under Language and the media, Snowclones
• David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log:
• All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or […]
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• Noah's Arch?January 27, 2010 @ 12:49 pm · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• Today's Non Sequitur:
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• Ludicrous, even derogatory?January 18, 2010 @ 8:50 am · Filed under Language and gender
• Here's a case where English has it relatively easy. There's been plenty of fuss over whether to retain actress or to use actor for females as well as males, whether to adopt new gender-neutral terms like chair and craft in place of chairman and craftsman, and so on. But most English words for social roles […]
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• Hatey?January 14, 2010 @ 9:25 am · Filed under Pronunciation
• Because of the awful disas=ter in Haiti, that country's name has been in the news, and this prompted reader RH to wonder about its English pronunciation.
• I am currently watching the CNN coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, and without exception the name of the country is pronounced "hatey". Surely "Hayiti", or even "Ayiti" would be […]
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• Being a Gators?January 2, 2010 @ 11:12 am · Filed under Morphology
• The Sugar Bowl, where the Florida Gators shellacked the Cincinnati Bearcats 51-24, was a disappointment to me as a football game. But there was some added value linguistically. Pete Thamel's NYT article ("Sweet Finish for Tebow and Gators", 1/2/2010) quotes Tim Tebow: “I dreamed about being a Gators since I was 6 years old […]
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• The posts of Christmas pastDecember 25, 2009 @ 10:24 am · Filed under Administration
• Since our Christmas-themed posts are a bit thin so far this year, here are a few topical blasts from Language Log's past:
• 2008: "Seven fishes"; "Happy Christmas";
• 2007: "One Christmas too long"; "Christmas and 'politically correct(ed)ness'", "'Tis the season", "The unkindness of strangers", "Victims and etymology", "Lexical repulsion", "Insert flap 'A' and throw away";
• 2006: "Merry … umm […]
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• I'm lovin' it - next to the toiletDecember 12, 2009 @ 8:49 am · Filed under Language and advertising
• Here's a sign for a McDonald's in the Guangzhou (Canton) Airport:
• The English slogan, "i'm lovin' it," is followed by the standard Chinese version: "WO3 JIU4 XI3HUAN1 ??? ("I just love [it])." To the right of the arches and the slogan, the sign gives directions for how to get there: "Go out at gate 9; walk […]
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• Naming people after godsDecember 10, 2009 @ 12:57 am · Filed under Language and culture
• Carol Hills, from The World, wrote to ask about historical and cultural differences in the use of religious names. Why, for example, is Jesus widely used as a personal name in Spanish-speaking countries but not in other traditionally Catholic areas? Among Hindus, Carol observes, some names of gods seem to be widely used as personal […]
• Permalink Comments (193)
• Crystal on FowlerDecember 7, 2009 @ 11:32 am · Filed under Books, Usage advice
• Oxford University Press has published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Nothing especially notable in that, except for bibliophiles and usage scholars. But what sets this publication apart is David Crystal's introduction to the volume, an assessment of Fowler's entries.
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• Hacking: who does what to whom?November 23, 2009 @ 11:50 am · Filed under Words words words
• A couple of days ago, Jesse Sheidlower wrote to me about the recent climate-scientist email controversy. Since Jesse is a lexicographer, he wasn't writing about whether this is the blue-dress moment for anthropogenic climate change, or a nontroversy based on the shocking discovery that scientists are not always scrupulously fair-minded in private. Rather, Jesse was […]
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• Questions and conditionalsNovember 21, 2009 @ 2:29 pm · Filed under Semantics, Syntax
• Decades ago, when I was little, I read this joke in Mad Magazine: Do your feet smell? Does your nose run? You may be built upside-down. I giggled for a short time - just a couple of days, I think - at the surprising coincidence of the two verb senses, […]
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• Co-brothers-in-lawNovember 19, 2009 @ 9:27 pm · Filed under Words words words
• Suppose that Edward is married to Susan and Michael is married to Susan's sister Judith. Edward is therefore Judith's brother-in-law, and Michael is Susan's brother-in-law. In my usage, and what I think is standard English usage, there is no named relationship between Edward and Michael. In particular, they are not brothers-in-law. I was therefore surprised […]
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• #thingsdarkiessayNovember 12, 2009 @ 8:08 am · Filed under Lost in Translation
• Dan Scherlis has pointed me to the recent #thingsdarkiessay TwitterStorm. Khaya Dlanga described it at length in a weblog post a week ago ("Yesterday, a short-lived war broke out between the US and SA"):
• A virtual war between the United States and South Africa was full-on yesterday, the weapon of choice being Twitter. Unfortunately, the weapon […]
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• Initial coordinators in technical, academic, and formal writingNovember 8, 2009 @ 11:04 am · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• Yesterday, I quoted someone writing on the nanowrimo forum ("Also, check the back seat", 11/7/2009), who offered an apparently irrefutable argument in favor of "No Initial Coordinators" (NIC), the zombie rule that forbids us to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and or but:
• [Usage standards and grammar] are related but not identical. […]
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• The F WordNovember 5, 2009 @ 3:52 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• Yesterday's South Park episode features an elaborate drama of grass-roots lexicography. The wikipedia entry gives some details:
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• Justice Kennedy interprets the passiveNovember 4, 2009 @ 9:57 am · Filed under Language and the law, Syntax, passives
• Anita Krishnakumar posts at Concurring Opinions on November 2 about a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Anthony Kennedy that turned quite crucially on the distinction between active and passive voice in the language of criminal statutes, only (you're ahead of me already aren't you, Language Log readers?) Justice Kennedy doesn't know his passive from a […]
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• Pronouns 'n' stuffNovember 3, 2009 @ 1:13 pm · Filed under Syntax, Terminology
• The comments on Geoff Pullum's recent "grammar gravy train" posting have wandered into the confused territory where the grammatical terms pronoun, possessive (or genitive), and determiner live. (The first two have a long history, going back to the grammatical traditions for Latin and Greek. The third is much more recent; OED2 takes it back only to […]
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• It's just the TAM LEDNovember 2, 2009 @ 4:41 pm · Filed under Nerdview
• On the base station for the wireless telephone system at my apartment there is a red light. I looked up in the manual to see what the semantics was. The relevant diagram was clear and explicit. The line pointing to that light on the picture of the base station unit said: "TAM […]
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• Alexander of __?October 31, 2009 @ 6:52 am · Filed under Books, Linguistic history
• As the Google search suggestions on the right indicate, we generally view Alexander the Great as a Macedonian, and therefore, as the Wikipedia article about him says, a "Greek king".
• But according to one of the many contrarian nuggets in Jim O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, this is the wrong way to look at […]
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• Four centuries of peevingOctober 30, 2009 @ 7:09 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics, Peeving
• Several readers have recommended Wednesday's Non Sequitur:
• Permalink Comments (50)



• CuteOctober 24, 2009 @ 7:08 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• Yesterday, most of the comments on The communicative properties of footwear dealt with the gender associations of the word cute. This linguistic stereotype is often used as the basis of comic-strip humor, frequently in the context of shopping, as in this Foxtrot strip from a few years ago:
• And (with a twist) in this Preteena from […]
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• The communicative properties of footwearOctober 23, 2009 @ 9:06 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• Two Cathy strips on this topic that I've been saving up:
• Permalink Comments (26)



• How NOT to Learn Chinese CharactersOctober 14, 2009 @ 2:29 pm · Filed under Writing Systems
• There are many ways NOT to learn Chinese characters, but one that I just found out about today is probably the worst, even worse than T. K. Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzles. It was written by Alison Matthews ("a statistician who has worked in the oil, aviation, tourism, medical and software industries") and Laurence Matthews […]
• Permalink Comments (67)



• Hoc est enim corpus linguisticsOctober 9, 2009 @ 9:01 am · Filed under Language and culture
• I'm at the AACL 2009 meeting in Edmonton - that's the meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, which is neither American nor an Association, as John Newman explained to me. I'll report later on some of what I see and hear.
• So far, the most notable thing has been the outside temperature of 20 […]
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• A dangler in The EconomistOctober 8, 2009 @ 4:01 am · Filed under Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax
• My view on the classic prescriptive bugaboo known as dangling modifiers or dangling participles (henceforth, danglers) is, I think, a bit unusual. I don't regard danglers as grammatical mistakes; that is, I think the syntax of English does not block them. Yet I do think they constitute mistakes, in a broader sense, so in […]
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• God speed the plowOctober 4, 2009 @ 8:06 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• A recent xkcd:
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• Memetic dynamics of low-hanging fruitSeptember 30, 2009 @ 7:55 am · Filed under Linguistic history
• Commenting on a post about Dilbert's take on "the vacuous way managers speak", Garrett Wollman wrote:
• I remember, or at least think I do, when "low-hanging fruit" was not yet vacant managerese. Is there any epidemiological data to suggest when this transition occurred?
• I'm not convinced that "low-hanging fruit" is accurately described as "vacant managerese" even […]
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• Missing the pointSeptember 22, 2009 @ 6:21 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• The next-to-latest xkcd:
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• Ask Language Log: "bored of"September 17, 2009 @ 8:33 am · Filed under Language and culture
• Sarah Currier asked:
• Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I […]
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• Malaysian MultilingualismSeptember 11, 2009 @ 3:52 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• Yilise Lin kindly called my attention to this article entitled "is hokkien my mother tongue?" (Hokkien consists of a number of topolects belonging to the Southern Min branch of Sinitic. They are spoken in Taiwan and in parts of the province of Fujian [on the southeast coast of China], and widely throughout Southeast Asia by […]
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• Joshua Whatmough and the donkeySeptember 1, 2009 @ 4:00 pm · Filed under Linguistic history
• At Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales, an irrepressible (and no doubt true) tale of Prof. Whatmough's Linguistics 120 at Harvard in 1962. If you read to the end, you'll find out about the donkey.
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• Annals of offense-findingAugust 25, 2009 @ 12:47 pm · Filed under Language attitudes
• From the Times Online of August 23, under the head "Quangos blackball … oops, sorry … veto 'racist' everyday phrases", a story that begins:
• It could be construed as a black day for the English language - but not if you work in the public sector.
• Dozens of quangos and taxpayer-funded organisations have ordered a purge of […]
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• Quadrilingual Washlet InstructionsAugust 22, 2009 @ 10:30 am · Filed under Lost in Translation
• Half an hour before touchdown at Narita, the pilot turns on the "fasten seat belt" sign. Because something (or some things) served during the in-flight meals on the 14-hour flight did not quite agree with your alimentary tract, you are already experiencing ominous rumblings down in your bowels.
• You do your best to ignore the bouncing […]
• Permalink Comments (29)



• Smallpox / Ceiling LightAugust 19, 2009 @ 3:22 pm · Filed under Lost in Translation
• Fail Blog has a picture of a panel with two switches labeled as follows:
• ??? ??
• SMALLPOX NIGHT LIGHT
• This photograph elicited considerable discussion at Fail Blog, but - despite well over 150 comments - there was much consternation and little comprehension of why or how the confusion occurred. The quality of the discussion at ADS-L was much […]
• Permalink Comments (22)



• The truth about iqualuitAugust 19, 2009 @ 12:37 pm · Filed under Lost in Translation, Morphology
• In response to my question here, an authoritative answer from Alana Johns, who was asked by Ewan Dunbar, who was asked by Bill Idsardi:
• iquq means stuff hanging down around the anus (dingleberries?). S___ says when they were kids they would tease each other by calling each other "iquq" (in English we also say "you dirty bum!")
• Adding […]
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• Think B4 You SpeakAugust 18, 2009 @ 9:03 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• According to Tycho at Penny Arcade ("The True Face of Our Enemy", 8/17/2009)
• The Think B4 You Speak campaign is basically incoherent, and operates from some deep misconceptions about how and why people communicate. These assertions have been collated and placed sequentially in today's comic offering
• The strip in question:
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• My illiterate search for the Sicilian animals (3)August 17, 2009 @ 2:13 pm · Filed under Orthography
• Well, now it is time to tell you the answer. (If you are saying "The answer to what?", you're in the wrong place. Start here, then go to here, and then come back.) Before I do, I should mention that half the readers of Language Log seem to have mailed me with […]
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• Weapons of denialAugust 1, 2009 @ 7:53 am · Filed under Language and culture
• Another opinion piece for our passive voice file: Marie Murray, "The passive voice is the penultimate weapon of denial", The Irish Times, 7/31/2009:
• The passive voice is especially useful where apologies are required: personal apologies for what people have done personally. Because instead of having to say, “I’m sorry”, the passive voice allows a culprit to […]
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• Staff linguistJuly 31, 2009 @ 1:34 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• Mae Sander has passed on this fascinating story from the joint website of the Ghana Institute of Architects and the Architects Registration Council of Ghana. According to the story (attributed to Prof. Ablade Glover of the College of Arts of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi), every Ghanaian chief
• has a linguist. He […]
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• Boko HaramJuly 29, 2009 @ 5:06 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• Boko Haram has been in the news recently, e.g. Joe Boyle, "Nigeria's 'Taliban' enigma", BBC News, 7/28/2009:
• They have launched co-ordinated attacks across northern Nigeria, threatening to overthrow the government and impose strict Islamic law - but who exactly are the Nigerian Taliban?
• Since the group emerged in 2004 they have become known as "Taliban", although they […]
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• Enemy = Cousin?July 16, 2009 @ 9:29 am · Filed under Language and politics
• According to Peter Bergen, "Winning the good war", Washington Monthly, July/August 2009:
• A corollary to the argument that Afghanistan is unconquerable is the argument that it is ungovernable—that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, and that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, have no interest in helping […]
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• American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nounsJuly 15, 2009 @ 11:34 am · Filed under Language and culture
• The discussion following my original post ("A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns", 7/13/2009) has proven quite edifying, at least to me. One thing that I realized from the lively comments is that I forgot to give an indication of how the name Xinjiang itself should be pronounced. There's also the […]
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• Word rage wins againJuly 12, 2009 @ 11:28 am · Filed under Language and culture
• A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?":
• 'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me - 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. He […]
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• A matter of chanceJuly 9, 2009 @ 7:05 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• I've observed from time to time, half-seriously, that the ambiguity of plural noun-phrase comparison ("women have better hearing than men") causes - as well as results from - the tendency to interpret small group differences as essential group characteristics (e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007; "Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical assymmetry", 6/18/2008; "Pop […]
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• Sarah as EstherJuly 8, 2009 @ 12:06 am · Filed under Language and politics
• Given the importance of religion in Sarah Palin's life, it's not surprising that her ways of talking are full of echoes or allusions that others may not understand or even notice. Earlier today I discussed her phrase "I know that I know that I know this is the right thing for Alaska". The same interview […]
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• Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo saJune 26, 2009 @ 3:23 pm · Filed under Language and music, Language play, Lost in Translation
• Ever since Michael Jackson's unexpected death yesterday, his music has been omnipresent. The iTunes sales charts are overwhelmed by Michael Jackson songs: as of this afternoon, New York Magazine's Vulture blog reports, Jackson appears on 41 songs in the iTunes Top 100 singles chart. One of the top songs is "Wanna Be Startin' […]
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• "Passive construction" means… nothing at all?June 25, 2009 @ 12:16 pm · Filed under Language and politics, passives
• OK, I give up. I admit that I was wrong. I thought that the grammatical term passive had developed a spectrum of everyday meanings like "vague about agency", "listless writing, lacking in vigor", and "failure to take sides in a conflict". But I've now reluctantly concluded that for some members of the chattering classes, it […]
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• SkeevyJune 22, 2009 @ 10:40 pm · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• There are a bunch of insulting sk- words - scummy, scurvy, scruffy, scuzzy, sketchy come to mind. And everybody, even a snoot, seems to like negative-vibe phonetic symbolism. So if you try to make up a new word on this general pattern, say "skudgy", you'll probably find that many others have been there before you: […]
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• Perso-Arabic and Sinitic LiteracyJune 19, 2009 @ 5:57 pm · Filed under Writing Systems
• In discussions of literacy in contemporary China, because of the unreliability of government statistics and the emotional, controversial nature of the topic, it is sometimes good to adopt a more historical perspective. Consequently, I shall from time to time write blogs drawing on first-hand records from earlier periods.
• On July 23, 1845, a British missionary named […]
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• More linguistic numismaticsJune 18, 2009 @ 4:31 pm · Filed under Awesomeness, Linguistic history, Writing Systems
• Samuel Johnson has been commemorated on a special 50p coin, as Geoff Pullum notes, but he's not the only linguist (or linguistically inclined scholar) that has been pictured on currency. Sejong the Great, the 15th-century Korean ruler who developed the Hangul alphabet, can be found on the South Korean 10,000-won banknote.
• This is from the most […]
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• Late update: linguist commemorated on a coinJune 18, 2009 @ 2:35 pm · Filed under Awesomeness
• I only just today happened to come into possession of one of the 50-pence coins issued in 2005 to commemorate a man we have to recognize as an early linguist: Dr Samuel Johnson, who published the first really successful monolingual dictionary of the English language, 250 years earlier, in 1755. I got the coin in […]
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• DongleJune 3, 2009 @ 9:00 am · Filed under Language and the media
• The OED glosses dongle as "A software protection device which must be plugged into a computer to enable the protected software to be used on it", and gives the earliest citation as
• 1982 MicroComputer Printout Jan. 19/2 The word ‘dongle’ has been appearing in many articles with reference to security systems for computer software [refers to […]
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• Egg blastMay 16, 2009 @ 6:40 pm · Filed under Lost in Translation
• It is by no means easy to understand headlines in your native language if you cross into a new cultural area, e.g. by crossing the Atlantic. And as headlines go, this one does fairly well at illustrating utter unintelligibility:
• GERS’ KIRK IN EGG BLAST
• It took up nearly half of the front page of The Scottish Sun […]
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• Word AttractionMay 13, 2009 @ 6:43 am · Filed under Psychology of language
• Over the years, several LL posts have documented the irrational aversion that people sometimes feel to certain words - a strong negative reation that is apparently not related to the meaning, or to any alleged fault in grammar or usage, but to the sound or feel of the word itself. (See the links in "Moist […]
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• Than whichMay 10, 2009 @ 6:50 pm · Filed under Humor
• A couple of weeks ago, the Schott's Vocab column in the NYT featured a request for "Family Phrases". This reminded me of a work that I recently read about (along with many other interesting things) in Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and […]
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• Who would not weep, if E. B. White were he?May 9, 2009 @ 5:35 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• For the upcoming 2009 Book Expo in New York, the Perseus Book Group (of which my publisher PublicAffairs is a member), has organized a project to collaboratively create and publish a book in as many formats as possible within 48 hours. The text of the book will consist of submissions from the public of the […]
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• Bembé, Attis, OrpheusMay 9, 2009 @ 8:17 am · Filed under Language and culture, Language and music, Phonetics and phonology
• A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't […]
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• First American Dies of Swine FluMay 6, 2009 @ 12:50 am · Filed under Pragmatics, Semantics
• Here's what I heard today on my local National Public Radio station: "The first American has died of swine flu." And also, for clarification, "The first American has died of H1N1." But who is or was the first American, I mused, heartlessly, while being an asshole in the defenseless Texan evening traffic. Obama? Benjamin Franklin? […]
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• Bumf boxMay 2, 2009 @ 3:23 pm · Filed under Lost in Translation
• When it comes to matters of the toilet, translators in China seem to reach for the old and arcane. Perhaps you may recall our "Closestool Encounters" back in March. And now witness the sign in the following photograph:
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• Simplified vs. Complex / TraditionalApril 23, 2009 @ 8:55 pm · Filed under Writing Systems
• All right. Something seems to be afoot.
• You will note in the this news story from China that there have lately been calls for a speedy and complete restitution of the complex / traditional (FANTI) characters. Of course, that won't happen (at least not right away), but if you read between the lines, it does seem […]
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• Justinian's linguistic legislationApril 21, 2009 @ 3:58 pm · Filed under Language and the law
• I happened to be browsing through my copy of Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire and came upon a passage I had forgotten about. The Emperor Justinian is known, if at all, for his legal code. The Justinian code was indeed a great success as a codification. It settled numerous disputed points of law […]
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• Sarah gobsmacked, nearly crashes the carApril 19, 2009 @ 1:32 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• My appearance on NPR nearly caused a car crash. Sarah Ferrell wrote in the NPR comments area: "I was in the car and rushed in to comment-I am gobsmacked." I can just see that Volvo careening around the corners on the way back from the supermarket and screeching to a halt in the […]
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• The dynamics of lexical competition in spoken word recognitionMarch 30, 2009 @ 11:04 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• Today's Cathy addresses the topic of ambiguity resolution in speech:
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• Private meaningsMarch 28, 2009 @ 12:06 pm · Filed under Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics
• Bizarro takes on a species of semantic error:
• From my 1980 booklet Mistakes (p. 14):
• Corresponding to the semantic errors above are PRIVATE MEANINGS … I have one friend who thought for a long time that Indo- meant 'southern, lower' (from its occurrence in Indochina) and another who believed that ritzy meant 'in poor taste' (as a […]
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• Compound semanticsMarch 22, 2009 @ 9:58 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• Today's Get Fuzzy:
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• The aggrieved passive voiceMarch 16, 2009 @ 8:04 pm · Filed under Ignorance of Linguistics, Language and culture
• This afternoon, John Baker posted to the American Dialect Society's listserv (ADS-L) the following note:
• Mark Liberman recently wrote in Language Log that, for everyone except linguists and a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals, what "passive voice" now means is "construction that is vague as to agency". Disturbingly, a short piece by Nancy Franklin in the March […]
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• Breck?nridgeMarch 11, 2009 @ 12:50 pm · Filed under Orthography, Phonetics and phonology
• My wife Karen and I just spent a long weekend with her family in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. As I've mentioned before, there are some noteworthy (though not necessarily unique) properties of the local Louisville accent. One of these is a property shared among many Southern dialects of American English in some form or […]
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• The crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope, de-SinicizedMarch 7, 2009 @ 4:17 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• It's been a while since we've seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." A simpler variation removes the "danger," suggesting that the Chinese character (or word) for "crisis" is the same as […]
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• Retching scheduleMarch 4, 2009 @ 11:09 pm · Filed under Peeving, Phonetics and phonology
• Tim Footman in the Guardian offers us a routine of standard-issue over-the-top retching about pronunciations other than his own. He pretends to get so overwrought on hearing someone saying mis-chiev-i-ous on BBC Radio 4 that he shouts at the radio (while temporarily so deranged that he is unable to tell that he was the […]
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• Scrabble tips for time travelers?February 26, 2009 @ 11:12 am · Filed under Language and the media
• This morning's BBC's News Hour program featured one of the most densely nonsensical three-minute sequences that I can ever recall having heard from a respectable media outlet:
• [Audio clip: view full post to listen]
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• I wouldn't be surprised if they didn'tFebruary 23, 2009 @ 7:59 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• David Craig sent in a link to yesterday's Blondie, a strip that I don't normally read. He may have uncovered the secret identity of Geoff Pullum's correspondent - but in any case, the last panel has a nice instance of overnegation, of a kind that I don't think we've discussed before:
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• Progress and its enemiesFebruary 16, 2009 @ 10:08 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com specializes in quantitative modeling of political trends, but yesterday he posted a terminological discussion of political philosophy, "The Two Progressivisms", distinguishing what he calls Rational Progessivism from what he calls Radical Progressivism. This reminded me of something that I noticed recently in reading Mark Halpern's book Language and Human Nature, namely […]
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• Castro on EmanuelFebruary 16, 2009 @ 10:36 am · Filed under Language and politics, Names
• Fidel Castro is evidently alive and well - and writing rambling, incoherent columns on political onomastics. As Julia Ioffe of the New Republic blog The Plank reports, Castro's latest editorial for Granma Internacional is a "deliciously confusing" excursus on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his name. Here are the opening lines in […]
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• What's on a scientific name?February 15, 2009 @ 3:50 pm · Filed under Names
• Recently I discovered that there's a fish named after my mother, Marion Grey, who was an ichthyologist specializing in the taxonomy of deep-sea fishes: it's called Bathylagus greyae, a.k.a. Grey's deepsea smelt. While looking around the relevant website (Hans G. Hansen's Biographical Etymology of Marine Organisms), I noticed something oddish. The Latinized name […]
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• High Five((')s) for ScienceFebruary 12, 2009 @ 1:14 pm · Filed under Punctuation
• Ten days ago I was returning to the US from Europe, and the first and main leg of the trip was a flight from Amsterdam to Houston. After passing through customs and immigration in Houston, I was stripping off shoes, belt, wallet, fillings, etc. to walk through the security scanners and re-enter the gate areas […]
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• If you're uneducated you say it rightFebruary 2, 2009 @ 7:18 am · Filed under Phonetics and phonology
• The most famous of all Finnish composers is surely Sibelius. His Latin name is that of his originally Swedish-speaking family, though he was born in Finland when it was a Grand Duchy within Russia, and his parents educated him in a Finnish-language school. In Latin (and in Swedish) the name Sibelius would have stress on […]
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• The lexical richness of Bostonian one-upmanshipFebruary 1, 2009 @ 3:11 pm · Filed under Language and culture, Words words words
• In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:
• Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight - person one insults person two, and person three informs person […]
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• ActuallyJanuary 30, 2009 @ 6:12 am · Filed under Pragmatics
• Victor Mair recently told me about someone who began a letter to him in a way that struck him as odd:
• "I actually have a pseudo linguistics question for you about the title of the Manchu emperor."
• Victor was surprised by this use of actually. He added:
• The next day, my sister from Seattle, who was visiting us […]
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• No word for fair?January 28, 2009 @ 8:46 am · Filed under Language and culture
• Over the years, we've discussed many cross-cultural comparisons based on the "No Word for X" meme. In the most recent LL post on the subject ("No word for integrity?", 12/31/2008), I asserted that
• [W]hen someone makes a sociological point by saying that language L has no word for concept C, you'll rarely lose by betting that […]
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• The boat that ain't sayin' nothin'January 26, 2009 @ 9:40 am · Filed under Words words words, Writing Systems
• Speeding east out of the Amsterdam area along dead straight train tracks beside a broad canal, I saw a huge cargo barge loaded up with giant shipping containers. It had several of the crew's automobiles parked on an upper deck. As the train whizzed past it and I could see the name on […]
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• Presidential parataxis?January 24, 2009 @ 11:46 am · Filed under Language and politics
• Unexpectedly, Stanley Fish's most recent NYT essay praises word-counting as a technique of rhetorical analysis ("Barack Obama's Prose Style"):
• One day after the occasion, USA Today offered as an analysis of [Obama's inaugural address] a list of the words most frequently used, words like America, common, generation, nation, people, today, world. This is exactly the right […]
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• Tories then and nowJanuary 22, 2009 @ 6:20 am · Filed under Language and politics
• Among the many discussions of yesterday's inaugural address, one that struck me was Eve Fairbanks' question "Why'd Obama Talk about George Washington?" She observes that "in the last half of the last century or so, George Washington was appropriated by right-wingers as 'their' founder"; and concludes that
• I thought Obama ended his speech with […]
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• Extreme etymologyJanuary 18, 2009 @ 7:28 am · Filed under Words words words
• Last week, there was an interesting Ask MetaFilter thread about how to find "a list of all the English words that can be traced back to a given root word" ("Word histories and dirt lions") , in which Language Hat helpfully linked to the American Heritage Dictionary's "lists of Indo-European and Semitic roots" as a […]
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• Some Wanderwörter in Indo-European languages January 16, 2009 @ 7:35 am · Filed under Linguistic history
• Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/2009) led to a series of additional posts in response to readers' questions: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, […]
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• The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibilityJanuary 15, 2009 @ 2:26 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• Yuval Pinter writes:
• When an English speaker doesn't understand a word one says, it's "Greek to me". When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it "sounds like Chinese". I've been told the Korean equivalent is "sounds like Hebrew".
• Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph? […]
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• Between libretto and liceJanuary 13, 2009 @ 5:26 pm · Filed under Words words words
• In connection with my difficult work on Language Log's "Financial Good News" desk, where things have been arduous and slow, I was looking something up in the American Heritage Dictionary earlier today (possibly liberalism, possible lien; to tell you the truth, I have forgotten what - something beginning with L, but I got sidetracked), when […]
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• Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidenceJanuary 13, 2009 @ 10:15 am · Filed under Linguistic history
• There has been quite a bit of interest in a series of guest posts by Don Ringe on the early linguistic history of Europe. Yesterday, he sent along another installment, which I've posted below on his behalf, as well as an answer to a question from the comments on an earlier post, which I'll post […]
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• More on IE wheels and horsesJanuary 10, 2009 @ 9:04 pm · Filed under Linguistic history
• Don Ringe's answer (" Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European") to the question that David Marjanovic asked about Don's earlier post ("The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe") stimulated some further questions, included these from Robert:
• What was the Anatolian word for wheel? Given its lack of mention above, I'd assume it isn't cognate […]
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• Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-EuropeanJanuary 10, 2009 @ 2:07 am · Filed under Linguistic history
• In response to Don Ringe's recent post on "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", David Marjanovic asked
• … is there a way to estimate how much time was available between the initial breakup of PIE and the establishment of sound changes that would make a Wanderwort traceable? I'd expect words like "horse" and "wheel" to potentially […]
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• The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal EuropeJanuary 6, 2009 @ 4:42 pm · Filed under Linguistic history
• What was Europe like, linguistically speaking, between the end of the last ice age and the coming of the Indo-European languages? This question has been in the background of many Language Log posts over the years. Not long ago, in the hallway between our offices, I asked Don Ringe for a summary of the state […]
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• An irreverence for powerJanuary 6, 2009 @ 12:38 am · Filed under Morphology, Variation, WTF, Words words words, negation
• I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds."
• I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. I […]
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• Of shoes, waffles, pants, shorts, tanks, and voicesDecember 17, 2008 @ 3:15 pm · Filed under Humor
• In the tradition of Woody Allen's "Slang Origins" (chapter 18 of his 1975 collection Without Feathers), John Kenney has written a hilarious op-ed piece for The New York Times ("The Shoe Heard Around the World", published Dec. 16, 2008), which is of course - obliquely but not quite so - about the shoes thrown at […]
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• Gas, blas, and chaosDecember 17, 2008 @ 8:20 am · Filed under Words words words
• This morning's serendipity is the history of gas, which turns out to come from chaos, and to have been coined almost 400 years ago by J. B. Van Helmont in association with another word, blas, that never caught on.
• I was curious about a slang use of gas in Edith Nesbit's The Magic City, to mean […]
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• A Jamaican named Hannukkah?December 16, 2008 @ 3:11 pm · Filed under WTF
• The famous Jamaican bobsled team is here in British Columbia to train, suitable facilities in Jamaica being somewhat lacking. I was surprised to learn that one of the bobsledders is named Hannukkah Wallace. Not only are few Jamaicans Jewish, but Hanukkah, though a Jewish word, is not normally used as a name. Does anyone know […]
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• Where are all those British collective plurals?December 3, 2008 @ 10:20 am · Filed under Variation
• I have some things to say about markedness, variation, and the role of habits in creating meaning. And I was planning to say them this morning, taking as a starting point the US/UK difference in verb agreement with collective nouns like government and committee that Geoff Pullum cited in his recent post "More on verb […]
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• Atlas of True(?) NamesNovember 22, 2008 @ 2:06 am · Filed under Linguistic history, Lost in Translation, Names
• As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots. It's a very clever idea, but in execution it enshrines some questionable notions of "truth."
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• The "meh" warsNovember 21, 2008 @ 1:45 am · Filed under Language and the media, Words words words
• The announcement that the next edition of Collins English Dictionary will be including the indifferent interjection meh (having beaten out other submissions from the public) has set off a bit of a squabble between Philadelphia's two alt-weeklies. Molly Eichel of Philadelphia City Paper blogged that "meh isn't a word - it's a sound effect." Joel […]
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• Liturgical -edNovember 2, 2008 @ 10:47 am · Filed under Linguistic history
• A couple of days ago, in response to John Gonzalez's question "Where does this unit rank among the most beloved Philly sports teams of all time?", Phil Sheridan answered:
• For me, this team has to rank up there with the Flyers' Stanley Cup-winning teams for sheer beloved-osity.
• This reminded me of a question from a reader […]
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• A party run amok by Sarah and Joe?November 1, 2008 @ 12:11 pm · Filed under WTF
• I was interested in this comment by BeachSaint on Matt Yglesias' post "Duberstein for Obama":
• Someone should check the seismic activity in the Simi Valley between now and election day because Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave over the antics of the McCain Campaign.
• I am a registered Republican who has received extensive campaign […]
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• Sarah Palin's Favorite MealOctober 26, 2008 @ 7:06 pm · Filed under Words words words
• John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has not been without controversy, but I think that we can all agree that one way in which it has been a good thing is that it has increased the visibility of the important topic of moose, which in burger form is reportedly her favorite […]
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• Obambulate - and bidentate, palinal, and ??October 21, 2008 @ 7:10 am · Filed under Words words words
• Several readers have pointed me to Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day entry for yesterday, obambulate:
• MEANING:
• verb tr.: To walk about.
• ETYMOLOGY:
• From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is from 1614.
• USAGE:
• "We have often […]
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• The Derivational FallacyOctober 20, 2008 @ 8:59 pm · Filed under Morphology, Semantics
• Etymology is not destiny, as we keep pointing out here. Thinking that it is is subscribing to the Etymological Fallacy (see here, among many other places). But even synchronically, you can't always trust what you see: derived lexical items are often specialized semantically (as are noun-noun compounds and also combinations of non-predicating adjective plus noun). […]
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• "Verbage" - not what it seemsOctober 20, 2008 @ 2:54 pm · Filed under Language and politics, Morphology
• I agree with Mark that James Wood's condescending comments about Palin's use of verbage are pure de-haut-en-bushwa. On the other hand, let's not delude ourselves about this item. Palin's verbage is not simply a term for "language" or "wording" that has been happily circulating in vernacular speech since it was first attested 200 years ago, […]
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• When you stride away, what is it that you've done?October 20, 2008 @ 6:41 am · Filed under Morphology, Syntax
• At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn't even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you've done? How would it be described? Have you […]
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• "G-dropping" as "non-G-adding"October 18, 2008 @ 9:01 pm · Filed under Linguistic history
• [This is really a comment on a comment on one of our recent posts about the sociopolitics of g-dropping - I've set it up as a separate post because it's too long to fit gracefully in the comments section.]
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• "Green behind the ears": the untold storyOctober 15, 2008 @ 3:14 pm · Filed under Idioms, Language and politics
• In my Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus website, I recently took a look at a peculiar turn of phrase used by Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 presidential debate: "Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears…" My initial assessment was that Obama had created an […]
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• Peak XOctober 14, 2008 @ 11:59 am · Filed under Language and politics
• Will Pavia at the Times, discussing the recent Loebner Prize event ("Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test", 10/13/2008), explains how he figured out which of his two interlocutors was human:
• The other correspondent was undoubtedly a robot. I asked it for its opinion on Sarah Palin, and it replied: ‘Sorry, don’t know her.’ No […]
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• Derivation by deletion of punctuationOctober 10, 2008 @ 10:49 pm · Filed under Linguistic history, Names
• There's a little lake near here called Sob Lake. I only recently learned the etymology of this name. According to Akrigg and Akrigg's British Columbia Place Names, the lake was originally named by a survey party. Finding the homesteader who lived nearby obnoxious, they recorded their opinion of him by naming the lake "S.O.B. Lake". […]
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• Munroe's LawOctober 9, 2008 @ 4:47 pm · Filed under Words words words
• Jesse Sheidlower, who as editor-at-large of the Oxford dictionary has a special right to an opinion about such things, emails:
• Please, please, someone write about this. I especially love the mouseover text.
• "This" is a recent xkcd strip:
• The mouseover text is "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. […]
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• Pinker on Palin's "nucular"October 5, 2008 @ 2:48 am · Filed under Language and politics, Uncategorized
• In an op-ed in Saturday's New York Times, Steve Pinker tries to explain or extenuate some of Sarah Palin's linguistic derelictions, real and alleged. Among other things, he says that Palin shouldn't be taxed for saying "nucular," which is
• …not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s […]
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• Pronouncing the LHCSeptember 22, 2008 @ 7:03 am · Filed under The language of science
• Now that the Large Hadron Collider is stumbling towards full operation, perhaps it's time to clarify how to parse (and interpret, and pronounce) its name. Is it the [large [hadron collider]] or the [[large hadron] collider]? Is it a device for colliding hadrons (in the way that a particle accelerator accelerates particles, and an atom […]
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• The Opacity and Difficulty of the Chinese ScriptSeptember 18, 2008 @ 12:09 pm · Filed under Writing Systems
• My class on the Chinese script has around 36 students in it. About half of them are native speakers from Taiwan, the Mainland, Singapore, and Hong Kong (most of these are graduate students who already have M.A.'s from overseas universities or are finishing up their Ph.D.'s). About one quarter of the other students are native […]
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• All hail the Hathi TrustSeptember 16, 2008 @ 5:18 pm · Filed under Research tools
• Anyone who has ever tried to use Google Book Search for serious historical research has had to grapple with its highly frustrating limitations. I've griped about the situation on several occasions (here, here, here, here). The problem is twofold: GBS is plagued by inaccurate or misleading dating, particularly for serial publications, and it does not […]
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• Moist aversion: the cartoon versionAugust 27, 2008 @ 8:37 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• Rob Harrell's Big Top comic takes on word aversion:
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• Crotch mistake? August 25, 2008 @ 2:58 pm · Filed under Words words words
• My little posting on Nico Muhly's "I like the crotch on the idea that …" has elicited a flood of e-mail suggesting that crotch is just a "malapropism" of some kind - an "eggcorn", perhaps - for crux. I've dismissed this proposal, in part because of the preposition on in Muhly's sentence, in part because R. […]
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• Beijing once againAugust 16, 2008 @ 3:35 pm · Filed under Language and the media, Orthography
• What with the Olympics being in ??, reporters are pronouncing it in various ways and the question of how to pronounce it is in the news again. Our local paper has an AP article by David Bauder which, Google reveals, is being carried all over the place. Here's one version.
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• Indigenous nudityAugust 13, 2008 @ 2:56 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock, Semantics, Syntax
• Caught on-screen in an episode (set in Namibia, a re-run from some years ago) of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a travel-and-food television show:
• This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised.
• It's a warning that there were to be (female) breasts and (male) penises on display, though surely only fleetingly or out of the main focus […]
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• Educational sky is falling says blithering windbagAugust 11, 2008 @ 1:27 pm · Filed under Language and the media, Prescriptivist Poppycock
• Week after week the language-and-literacy pontificators fulminate in newspapers and magazines, nearly always revealing how little they know about language. The worst case I've seen in the past week is a column by Howard Jacobson in The Independent about how old teaching methods worked and new ones don't (muted thanks to Steve Jones […]
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• The truth about inferAugust 11, 2008 @ 7:45 am · Filed under Words words words
• The other day, I dropped a passing reference to the misuse of infer to mean "imply". The facts, as John Cowan reminded me in a comment, are more complicated. A few minutes of research reveals that the truth about infer is even more complex - and more interesting - than I suspected.
• Let's start with […]
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• Heroic feats of etymologyJuly 30, 2008 @ 8:01 am · Filed under Words words words
• The "About Us" page for the new search engine Cuil says that
• Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.
• There has been considerable discussion at the Wikipedia discussion page for Cuil about whether this is really true.
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• CuilJuly 29, 2008 @ 8:16 am · Filed under HLT, Humor
• This speaks for itself, I think - the first referral from the new Cuil search engine that I've noticed in our referrer logs:
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• Correcting misinformationJuly 26, 2008 @ 2:08 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
• I'm something of a fan of books that correct misinformation - about facts in general, about famous quotations, about medical matters, and so on. Among my latest acquisitions is John Lloyd and John Mitchinson's The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong (2006) (with a foreword by Stephen Fry - yes, THAT […]
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• Ar(c)ticJuly 22, 2008 @ 3:05 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• The text for the day comes from Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage, in the entry Artic/Arctic:
• Although some brand names have incorporated this popular error, remember that the Arctic Circle is an arc. By the way, Ralph Vaughan Williams called his suite drawn from the score of the film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, but that’s Italian, not […]
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• Japanese (and Chinese) OnomatopoeiaJuly 21, 2008 @ 8:43 pm · Filed under Language and culture
• I find Japanese to be YUNIIKU ("unique") in many respects. One of the most fascinating aspects of Japanese (aside from the enormous number of GAIRAIGO ??? ["loanwords"]) is the large amount of onomatopoeic expressions that may be drawn upon to add spice to almost anything that one wishes to say.
• The immediate cause of my […]
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• Dumb headlines, vol. CXXXVIIJuly 18, 2008 @ 12:16 pm · Filed under The language of science
• After reading about the evolutionary origins of (some brainstem pathways controlling) social vocalization, you might enjoy seeing what you get from people who get paid for explaining things to you, and have actual editors and stuff:
• "Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins"; "Honey? Gurgle, gurgle"; "Researchers report toadfish sing to attract mates"; "When fish talk, scientists listen"; "We […]
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• Blackjack?July 17, 2008 @ 8:05 am · Filed under Language and culture
• I'm always happy to learn new things about playground culture. Like language, it's somehow completely consistent and endlessly variable across time and space. And now that my main source for contemporary playground lore (e.g. "Pickle jinx", 12/16/2003; "High jinx", 12/17/2003) has graduated to new sorts of games, I have to rely on internet clues like […]
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• Temporally speakingJuly 16, 2008 @ 12:22 pm · Filed under Errors, Orthography
• On BoingBoing, someone sent in this photo of an AT&T store in downtown Manhattan:
• "Perhaps it'll be available last year," Mark Frauenfelder wryly notes. Commenters chime in with their own time-travel jokes, and a couple point out the added typo of "out stock" for "out of stock." One commenter wonders if the photo's a fake, but […]
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• Dare to be bilingualJuly 14, 2008 @ 6:40 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• This is a follow-up on my Language devaluation and Pushing buttons posts from last Monday, and coincidentally also a follow-up on (the first comment on) Bill Poser's Obama's Indonesian post from Friday.
• I had promised in the Language devaluation post that I would (when I found the time) collect arguments for why English should not be […]
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• X holeJuly 14, 2008 @ 7:48 am · Filed under Language and politics
• Yesterday, a reader sent a link to Kevin Krause, "Dallas County officials spar over 'black hole' comment", Dallas Morning News (Dallas City Hall blog), 7/7/2008:
• A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
• County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments […]
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• Pushing buttonsJuly 7, 2008 @ 3:34 pm · Filed under Language and politics
• While driving somewhere in the North County of San Diego this past holiday weekend, I found myself behind a large Ford Extravaganza (or Excursion, Expedition, Explorer, whatever) with a bumper sticker proclaiming:
• BOYCOTT ANY COMPANY
• THAT REQUIRES YOU TO
• PRESS `1' FOR ENGLISH!!
• I couldn't (easily) find an image of this bumper sticker on the Interwebs, but in […]
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• CloackroomJuly 3, 2008 @ 1:03 am · Filed under Lost in Translation
• That's what they call it, over at the Palais des Congrès in Paris:
• Do you suppose that the Académie Française made them stick in the extra c? Anyhow, there are quite a few of these signs - I think I saw four, and probably there are more.
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• Honest but unhelpfulJuly 1, 2008 @ 4:37 pm · Filed under Lost in Translation
• From Victor Mair:
• The Chinese characters are CAN1TING1 ?? ("dining hall")
• [Source of photograph: Facebook; uploaded by Samuel Osouf; taken on the Beijing-Taiyuan expressway in June, 2008. Link sent to Victor by Ori Tavor.]
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• "Skadoosh" and the case of the schwaJune 29, 2008 @ 12:03 pm · Filed under Orthography, Phonetics and phonology
• In today's Boston Globe it's my honor to pinch-hit for a vacationing Jan Freeman, who writes a fantastic weekly column called "The Word." I took the opportunity to write about a word popularized by the new movie "Kung Fu Panda": skadoosh. Or is it skidoosh? Or maybe skedoosh?
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• Beyond BarkingJune 24, 2008 @ 4:55 pm · Filed under Syntax, prepositions
• Adrian Morgan pointed out to me a Usenet comment in which someone says of some course of action that it "can hardly be a sane policy for anyone who is not evincing signs of heading distinctly dagenham". In this context dagenham is apparently to be taken as a synonym for "insane", by a rather […]
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• Linguistic purity?June 13, 2008 @ 6:41 am · Filed under The language of science
• "Purity" at xkcd:
• Addendum by Simon Holloway at Davar Akher: "Of course, you can’t see Linguistics because it’s waaaay over to the right."
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• Who was Betty Martin?June 12, 2008 @ 6:52 am · Filed under Names
• P Terry Hunt asked:
• I was struck by part of the passage quoted from the Coleridge poem, which I understand dates from 1815:
• "All my I! all my I!
• He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!"
• I'm sure many are familiar with the (now somewhat old-fashioned) British slang expression "All my eye [sic] and Betty Martin" - […]
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• Querkopf von Klubstick returnsJune 10, 2008 @ 9:11 am · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• Yesterday, a correspondent I'll identify as "Kevin S" sent me a left-handed compliment:
• Someone recommended your posts on Language Log as an instance where I might encounter a rational form of Descriptivism. I must admit, you do generally write well, and your "mask of sanity" appears firm. It doesn't take long, however, before the mask […]
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• High flatulent languageJune 4, 2008 @ 2:27 pm · Filed under Errors, Language and the media, Orthography
• Christopher A. Craig sends along a gem of a Cupertino (our term for a spellchecker-induced miscorrection), from today's "Washington Wire" blog on the online Wall Street Journal. The piece describes an anti-Obama Youtube video from the Republican National Committee that uses clips of other Democrats talking negatively about Obama in the past:
• Clips of former President […]
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• "Chad" back in the newsMay 30, 2008 @ 2:35 pm · Filed under Language and politics, Syntax, Words words words
• Most of us haven't thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. The word dominated the news so much back then that the American Dialect Society anointed it Word of the Year. But now the HBO docudrama Recount has brought back memories of chad - taking us back to the […]
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• High PatronageMay 30, 2008 @ 9:13 am · Filed under Language and politics
• The conference I'm attending, LREC 2008, is being held in Marrakech, Morroco, "under the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI". I don't know what this means in practical terms: does this patronage come with a subsidy, or is it simply a conventional phrase for events held at the government-run Palais des Congres, or […]
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• Bizarro roundupMay 29, 2008 @ 11:53 am · Filed under Linguistics in the comics
• A collection of Bizarro cartoons I've been accumulating for some time:
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• Not post-colonial enough?May 14, 2008 @ 7:04 am · Filed under Language and politics, Orthography
• Because of the recent catastrophe in the Irawaddy delta, the names of the country formerly known as Burma are in the news again. The same thing happened last fall, when the news was full of protest marches led by Buddhist monks ("Should it be Burma or Myanmar?", BBC News Magazine, 9/26/2008):
• The ruling military junta changed […]
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• ContaminationMay 10, 2008 @ 2:25 pm · Filed under Prescriptivist Poppycock
• From the annals of incorrection: cases where, because of some structural similarity between constructions C1 and C2, some people see C1 (incorrectly) as an instance of C2, where C2 is believed (incorrectly) to be non-standard (or defective in some other way), so that these people avoid C2 and replace it by something else. The proscription […]
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• Another thing coming about another think comingMay 3, 2008 @ 12:26 pm · Filed under Language and the media, Orthography, Phonetics and phonology
• Last week, I discussed some of the things that Rev. Jeremiah Wright had to say at the National Press Club about race, language, and the brain ("Wright on language and linguistics", 4/29/2008). But I didn't discuss the passage that many journalists identified as the rhetorical and emotional core of his outburst. (Click the link to […]
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• Waza wazaApril 20, 2008 @ 7:19 am · Filed under Uncategorized
• The illustration is from Taro Gomi, An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, by way of a new addition to our blogroll, The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse.
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• AboutApril 8, 2008 @ 2:33 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
• Language Log was started in the summer of 2003 by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. For nearly five years, it ran on the same elderly linux box, with the same 2003-era blogging software, sitting in a dusty corner of a group office at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Other […]
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