News
- Grammarphobia: Blog | Grammarphobia
- languagehat.com
Q: Can euphemisms turn into dysphemisms and vice versa? If yes, why does it happen? A: Yes, euphemisms can turn into dysphemisms, and vice versa. The change from a euphemism [...]
Q: Was it ever normal to rhyme “misery” and “high”? I’m thinking of a couplet (“Make safe the way that leads on high, / And close the path to misery”) [...]
Q: I saw this headline over an NPR article: “VP Vance tries to progress Gaza ceasefire.” Is that a permissible use of “progress”? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it [...]
Q: I say “fetch” when I want my Lab, Gracie, to retrieve something, but “fetching” may refer to her good looks as well as her retrieving. Am I right to [...]
Q: I’ve been hearing the word “hopium” used for an imaginary opiate taken to achieve unrealistic optimism, and “copium” used for one taken to endure hard times. I don’t see [...]
Q: After reading your recent article about Hank Stram’s coining a football sense of “matriculate,” I remembered reading a long way back that Stram also coined “Super Bowl.” A: No, [...]
[Note: In observation of Christmas week, we’re republishing a post that originally appeared on Dec. 23, 2022.] Q: Which is the more traditional version of this Christmas carol: “God Rest [...]
Q: I thought I might further muddy the waters of the wonderful word featured in your post about “dasn’t.” I once saw it defined as a contraction of “darest not,” [...]
Q: I was catching up with The Wire, the TV crime series. In episode one of season five, originally aired in 2008, editors at The Baltimore Sun tell a reporter [...]
Q: I’ve been noticing lately the strange use of “went to go” to form the past tense, as in “went to go see a movie,” “went to go swim,” and [...]
Q: Why did grammatical gender ever develop in the first place, and to what purpose? English lost it centuries ago, apparently to no ill effect. A: Grammatical gender, a system for [...]
Q: Do you think “you and I” should be “you and me” in the first part of Genesis 31:44 (English Standard Version): “Come now, let us make a covenant, you [...]
Q: In the class-conscious Sussex, England, of the 1950s, my mother would label certain people at the village Women’s Institute “not quite quite.” What is the history of this usage? [...]
Q: When I hear football sportscasters state that Team 1 has “matriculated” the football down the field, I (perhaps smugly) question whether the sportscasters have ever matriculated themselves. A: Standard dictionaries [...]
Q: My daughter and I were watching a DVD of the 1942 Disney film Bambi when I thought of this question: Is the verb “fawn” (to show affection or flatter) [...]
Q: What is the meaning of “smack” in a sentence like “it smacked of bigotry”? A: When something “smacks of bigotry,” it has a trace or a suggestion of bigotry, [...]
Q: The expression “as I alluded to earlier” has been rife amongst sports broadcasters and now seems to have spread beyond that sphere. Is the use of “allude” for a [...]
Q: I saw this sentence the other day in Two Faced Murder, a 1946 mystery by Jean Leslie: “The professor is yclept Peter, and I hate to have him called Pete.” What’s [...]
Q: A recent BuzzFeed headline suggested that Travis Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift sooner than he intended because she was “antsy.” Now I’m antsy about learning the history of “antsy.” [...]
Q: I think you can say, “The new bits last longer than the old bits,” but you can’t say, “The new bits last shorter than the old bits.” Why is [...]
Once, long ago, when Languagehat was a pup, Blogovia flourished, and friendly links o’erspread the world like a canopy. Now, like a region abandoned by industry, it is full of [...]
I wasn’t sure whether to post Naomi Kanakia’s The New Yorker offered him a deal, because it’s very long and wouldn’t be of much interest to someone who didn’t care [...]
The video How Far Back Can You Understand Northern English? nominally lasts twenty minutes, but it will take longer if, like me, you keep pausing it to read the footnotes. [...]
I was shamed by David Eddyshaw’s recent comment (“I highly recommend The English Understand Wool to the three Hatters who have not already read it”) — he, of course, had [...]
I know “odd British pronunciations” is a hoary old trope, and we’ve had posts about it before, but I was struck when looking something up in my trusty BBC Pronouncing [...]
Continuing to look through Michael Weiss’s Elementary Lessons in Tocharian B (see yesterday’s post), I was struck by a word in this passage: In Classical Tocharian B ä and a, [...]
Nelson Goering in a Facebook post showed an image of a footnote from Kuśiññe Kantwo: Elementary Lessons in Tocharian B by Michael Weiss (p. xx fn. 31) that I couldn’t [...]
A couple of place names that have recently crossed my path: 1) I enjoyed the 1952 movie Macao and followed the action as best I could on a map I [...]
I’m not a great fan of the opera Carmen, but Larry Wolff’s NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of a recent Met production has some material of Hattic interest: In [...]
We’ve discussed Ryan Starkey before, but I recently took a look at his website, Starkey Comics (“Colourful images about culture and language”), and was astonished at the breadth of his [...]
Our nightly reading these days is Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which I first read three decades ago and have very much been wanting to revisit; at close to 2,000 pages, [...]
My wife and I were talking about sukiyaki (which her mother had enjoyed in a NYC Japanese restaurant sometime in the 1930s-’40s) and I wondered how far back it went [...]
I’ve frequently had occasion to complain about translators simply skipping passages they found difficult, and I’ve run across some in my latest reading. I decided to finally try one of [...]
A recent Works in Progress post by Henry Oliver is far too long and repetitious (ironically, because his subject is style in English), but it has some useful thoughts and [...]
Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows: It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana [...]
I saw a mention of a Boris Vian novel called Trouble dans les andains and was troubled by the fact that I had no idea what andains were. Wikipedia gave [...]
Joel at Far Outliers posts excerpts from Aleksandra Jagielska’s Culture.pl article on entomological etymology: The word pszczoła [‘bee’] has Proto-Slavic origins, probably even Proto-Indo-European – if we go back that [...]
Articles
Youtube Channels
Langfocus – Languages and reaching out into the wider world
JuLingo – Linguist from Latvia
Jackson Crawford – Norse language and myth, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus
Say It In Swedish – Swedish and Swedish culture in a fun and casual way with the Swede, Joakim, from Stockholm
Infographics
