Linguistics

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,” [...]

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. [...]

Robert Booth, UK technology editor for the Grauniad, tells us breathlessly about AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon: AI models have begun communicating [...]

John McIntyre reposted A newsroom taxonomy, and even though I never worked in a newsroom I definitely worked in editorial departments enough to be familiar with most of these types. [...]

Having loved A City of Sadness (see this post), I decided to read Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 by Seiji Shirane [...]

I discovered that the Godard movie Bande à part/Band of Outsiders, normally untranslated in Spanish, was marketed in Mexico as Iban por lana, ‘They went for wool,’ which confused me, [...]

From this Facebook post by Sarah Thomason I learned the word hoghenhine; OED (entry revised 2010): Law. historical. A person who has stayed in a household for three nights, and [...]

As a fan of both Jean-Luc Godard and typography, how could I resist Paule Palacios-Dalens’ 2019 article Jean-Luc Godard, the Typographer with a Movie Camera (originally Jean-Luc Godard,le typographe à [...]

A paper by Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35 1-4 [2017-2018]: 31-42) begins by quoting Roman Szporluk on the origins of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity and asks “If [...]

Joel has another great excerpt from Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (see this post); after a passage on religion, it continues: [...]

Songdog and I are making some changes that we hope will improve reliability so the site doesn’t keep being unreachable. There may be bumps along the way; be patient! [...]

Just a quick post — we had people over, and it’s late — but I wanted to mention a phrase I was unfamiliar with that turned up in an episode [...]