Linguistics

Q: I would love to see a story on “performative gratitude,” a term for expressing gratefulness when you don’t really mean it. The usage seems to be flooding society. A: [...]

Q: I was discussing well-being this morning and wondered about its antonym. AI says “the opposite of wellbeing is often considered to be illbeing, which refers to a state of poor [...]

‘Q: I am used to reading older texts that use “my” before consonants (“my love”) and “mine” before vowels (“mine eyes”). But once in a while I see them used [...]

Q: I recently encountered a sentence about the need for “state and local leadership on immigration.” This use of “on” strikes me as lazy and inconsiderate of syntax. It’s probably [...]

Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking. Which came first? A: The expression “make [...]

Q: How can we get everyone to quit using “loose” when they mean “lose”? It’s driving me insane! A: The word “lose” is usually a verb with the sense of [...]

Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” [...]

Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related. He says they aren’t. Huh? Could that be right?  A: Yes. [...]

Q: I am wondering how chimera has come to mean both “an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts” and “an unrealizable dream.” A: When “chimera” originally appeared in ancient Greece as [...]

Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of [...]

Last week Brian Flesser, known in these parts as cuchuflete, let me know that he was in the ICU and not expected to last long (“Have had a good run [...]

I posted this to Wordorigins, but I’m still unsatisfied, so I thought I’d see if the Hattery could provide enlightenment: My wife asked me about the phrase “have it in [...]

I’m afraid it’s another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (cf. Abbots and Beavers, Textual Criticism as Rhetoric) — I just can’t resist this stuff! Disputes about the [...]

I just realized I’ve had a link to this post by bulbul sitting around for months, and by gad I’m finally gonna share it! In the history of native Syriac [...]

Erik McDonald at XIX век has been posting translation comparisons at a rate of about one a year, and even though there’s been little response to my previous posts about [...]

Remember the old web directories (Yahoo, DMOZ)? They were a great way to find your way around, and thanks to the usual nostalgia cycle there are some new examples. Here [...]

By popular demand, another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers. From ch. 3 “Establishing the text 1: recension”: Although the ideal of the recoverable original is impossible to [...]

How could I not post Hsi-Yao Su’s “Global Swearword, local ideologies: The Re-semiotization and indexical field of Fuck in Taiwan” (Language & Communication, July 2026; open access)? Abstract This study [...]

Vita Nouva has a remarkable interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt: Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue [...]

As soon as I started reading Joseph O’Neill’s “Forward Into Foreignness” (called “Polyglotism” in the paper version of the issue of the New Yorker I was reading; archived), I knew [...]