Linguistics

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. [...]

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 [...]

Ben Yagoda has a post about the recent rise in frequency of the word alongside: The American-born University of Sussex linguist Lynne Murphy recently remarked on her blog (Separated by [...]

It popped into my head to wonder about the origin of the titular phrase: did it ascend to antiquity? Was its origin in the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, ancient Sumer? [...]

I don’t normally make separate posts for different reviews of the same book, but Colin Burrow’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry has so little [...]

Joel of Far Outliers has posted some excerpts of Mikołaj Gliński’s contribution to a newsletter from Culture.pl, How much Polish is there in Esperanto?; it begins: The Slavic Esperanto lexicon [...]

From Raymond N. MacKenzie’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of David Coward and William Butcher’s new translation of Jules Verne, Journey to the Moon, some passages about how his [...]

The papyrus was published in 1940, but I hadn’t seen it until now, and perhaps it will be new to you as well: A 3rd century papyrus conjugating γράφω in [...]

Frequent commenter Y wrote me as follows: Two interesting bits. I don’t know if they are blog material but I hope you’ll find them interesting in any case: — First [...]

My brother sent me this link illustrating and defining the Scots word sook (SND), given as “sycophant, crawler, toady, to fawn and flatter” with the sample sentence “Ah’ve heard o [...]

About: Alman is a simplified dialect of German designed to reduce the complexity of the language while maintaining mutual intelligibility with Standard German. It systematically eliminates several complex grammatical features: [...]

I always enjoy the NY Times‘ Metropolitan Diary section (little tales of city life sent in by readers), and today there was one that made my linguistic antennae vibrate: Dear [...]