Linguistics

Q: More and more, I am hearing people say “not trying to” when they mean “trying not to.” I just saw a woman on YouTube who said, “I wasn’t trying [...]

Q: The Wall Street Journal recently cited speculation that Russia’s aggressive military recruitment “preludes another draft.” If I had written it, I would have used “presages.” Any thoughts? A: Yes, [...]

Q: I have noticed the absence of the subjunctive in lines from recent shows and movies. Have you? A: The English subjunctive has been gradually disappearing since Anglo-Saxon days, with [...]

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,” [...]

In a recent comment, Y wrote: Recently announced: Gallicagram, an ngram site for French sources and much more. It’s far more advanced and slicker than Google ngrams. Although it doesn’t [...]

A couple of terms new to me, with OED definitions and citations: 1) well-set-up (entry revised 2014) Now somewhat archaic. Having a good, strong, or upright figure. Cf. well-set adj. [...]

I treated myself to a CD of Kenny Garrett’s 2003 album Standard of Language, having been seduced by the Penguin Guide to Jazz calling it “unmissable” (and indeed I was [...]

The Log has a guest post by Jean Charconnet about the use of analogy in discourse; here’s the beginning: Thirty years ago I defended a doctoral thesis on analogy, later [...]

Ben Yagoda posted on FB: Pronunciation question: How do you say the word “housing”: A, “howzing” or B, “house-ing”? I had always said A, and feel that I exclusively heard [...]

Peter Brooks is always worth reading, and his NYRB review article “In Search of His Vocation” (March 21, 2024 issue; archived) has interesting things to say about Proust, but what [...]

Laudator Temporis Acti presents a quote from Plautus beginning: virtus praemium est optumum; virtus omnibus rebus anteit profecto The translation (by Paul Nixon) begins “Courage is the very best gift [...]

Taleen Mardirossian’s The Mother Tongue of All Secrets (The Sunday Long Read, September 12, 2026) is well worth your while; I’ll post a few excerpts so you can see why [...]

The Oxford Traherne reports on their new digital collator: The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for [...]

In yesterday’s thread, Rodger C wrote: Surely unrelated, but I can’t resist mentioning it here, is Mozeemlek, a people of western North America mentioned by Lahontan in the early 18th [...]