August 2009
1 post
Pejoratively...
Following the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, Slate this week discussed the use of mentally retarded. This term has apparently been deemed unacceptable, and is being replaced by intellectual disability.
The process by which a term designating a sensitive concept becomes considered increasingly taboo, and is eventually superseded by a more politically correct...
July 2009
6 posts
Homophonically...
I recently received an invitation to my brother’s wedding. Included in the information about travel, hotel arrangements, dress, etc. was this statement:
Only your presence is requested.
According to my brother, this is a fairly standard way of saying ‘We’re not asking for any gifts’. A common alternative, eschewed by my brother and his fiancée as a bit hokey, is:
Your...
Simultaneously...
There are various ways that languages can come to have the same or similar words. Sometimes it’s merely a case of coincidence: Given the finite number of possible speech sounds, and the limited number of combinations of those sounds, completely unconnected languages occasionally end up with approximately the same word for approximately the same thing.
More often, true cognates arise when...
Diachronically...
Much linguistic study is synchronic, looking at language at a particular point in time. Diachronic linguistics, in contrast, involves the study of language over time. Both are important: While we can learn a lot about a language just by looking at how it is now, we must also acknowledge that language is never static, and continues to evolve even as we try to pin it down.
Enter the recently...
Innately...?
The BBC had an article last week about the Human Speechome Project, an endeavour in which a large proportion of the speech heard and produced by a single child during the first couple of years of his life were recorded and meticulously transcribed. This undertaking has the potential to tell us a great deal about how children acquire language (though it may be quite ethically dubious).
Slightly...
Poetically...
A linguistics appropriate poem:
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
-Emily Dickinson
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Adverbially...
Astute readers might have noticed that, fitting with the ‘iloveadverbs’ URL (chosen by my sister), every post on this blog is titled with an adverb. I must admit that I got this idea from the book Adverbs by Daniel Handler (also the author of the vocabulary enriching children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events). Disappointingly, Adverbs is actually not about adverbs at all,...
June 2009
6 posts
Inadvertently...
Not only do neologisms arise all the time in everyday language, but words are also consciously created for marketing or branding reasons. Many of these have even become popular enough to gain an equal footing with more generic terms: Americans Xerox instead of photocopying, while Britons Hoover instead of vacuuming (though Hoover was actually someone’s name, not an arbitrary advertising...
Howlingly...
A friend sent me an etymological question last week.
‘I was wondering today. If you blend hoot with owl, you have howl. This almost seems like a blend to me, except that non-owl animals also howl, like wolves. What do you make of this phenomena?’
In linguistics, the term ‘blend’ refers to a word that is formed from (incomplete) bits of other words. Smog, from smoke and...
Orthographically Again...
Apparently, quite a lot of people heard about the recommended discontinuation of the ‘i before e’ rule I wrote about yesterday. Language Log now has a post about it (there’s even a link to where the original governmental report can be downloaded).
Also, it came up at a birthday gathering I was at last night. One person commented that a teacher had once told him that all rules...
Orthographically...
From ‘Schools to rethink “i before e”’ published on the BBC yesterday.
‘The spelling mantra “i before e except after c” is no longer worth teaching, according to the government. Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren.’
As my grade...
Elliptically...
Speakers often leave out words or phrases that have already been used in the same sentence or a previous one. Syntacticians call this ‘ellipsis’. For instance, (1)b. is a perfectly acceptable alternative to (1)a., while (2)b., c., d., e., and f. are all probably more likely (and certainly more succinct) answers than (2)a.
(1) a. Maisie’s a dog, but I’m not a dog. b. Maisie’s a dog,...
(Un)Happily...
On my way home the other day I spotted an adolescent girl wearing a T-shirt printed with the following declaration:
HAPPY ABOUT NOTHING
‘How cheerful!’ I thought. After a few moments’ contemplation, however, I realised that said slogan might in fact be an expression of angst. Was this girl, in fact, proclaiming that nothing made her happy? Or, as I had originally interpreted it, that she was...
December 2008
1 post
Debatably...
I am currently visiting my parents in Maryland, and came across this cartoon in the local paper the other day.
Moot is an auto-antonym, meaning that it has two contradictory uses. As in the third panel, moot is often used to describe something that is not open or pertinent to debate. It’s original meaning, though, is ‘debatable’. The second woman thus appears not only to be...
November 2008
8 posts
Prolixly...
My friend A has kindly been scouting out linguistically interesting signs for me. He recently sent along a couple of photos. The first is of a sign located outside some sort of new age shop.
Apparently, the candle purveyors are at great pains to stress that the candle snuffer is, in fact, free. While either instance of free would have been sufficient on its own, it is notable that they are...
Translationally...
Facebook wants to know: ‘Do you speak English (UK)?’.
I assume it’s asking me this because I’ve told it I live in Britain. Indeed, several of my friends have commented that they, too, have been asked to ‘Help translate Facebook into English (UK) so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages.’
I’m all for linguistic pluralism,...
Deictically...
I recently came across this cartoon while reading The New Yorker online. It depicts a woman going past a bar where someone has taped a sign in the window that says ‘I’m not here’.
Part of the humour here, of course, is that whoever put the sign up is probably in the bar, making the sign untrue. In fact, the statement ‘I’m not here’ can actually never be...
Meaningfully...
The New York Times today reviews Alphabet Juice, a frolic by Roy Blount Jr. One bit of the discussion struck me particularly:
‘Disdaining those scholars who think the relation between words and their meanings is arbitrary, he argues that “all language, at some level, is body language.” Beyond the clearly imitative words, like the onomatopoeic “boom,” “poof” and “gong,” Blount zeroes in on...
Ambiguously...
Variations in the structure of a word can lead to ambiguity. For instance, unbuttonable has two possible interpretations.
(1) a. un[buttonable]‘not able to be buttoned’
b. [unbutton]able ‘able to be unbuttoned’
Structural ambiguity also comes up in sentences.
(2) a. Hamish { hit [ the man with the haggis ] }. ‘Hamish hit the man who had the haggis.’ b. Hamish { [ hit the man ] with the...
Maddeningly...
Not long ago, my friend H sent me the following message:
‘You know the expression “I used to ”? Would you say “Did you use to ” or “Did you used to ”?? It’s driving me crazy!!’
In questions (and other constructions) that use ‘do-support’, tense is marked on do rather than the main verb.
(1) a. Did you eat the cake? b. *Do you...
Suggestively...
I was taught in my undergraduate sociolinguistics class that sex is an essentially binary biological definition, while gender is a gradient social construct. However, gender is often substituted for sex in order avoid any implication of the alternate, somewhat taboo interpretation of the latter. Such was the case on a form that participants were required to fill out for a study my friend E has...
Eunoically...
Originally published in 2001, Eunoia consists of five chapters, each making use of only a single vowel. Following in the footsteps of the Oulipo movement, Christian Bök imposes this limitation in order to show that ‘even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought.’
While I will not comment on the literary merits of this...
October 2008
1 post
Bizarrely...
My sister sent me an e-mail ten days ago with the following news:
‘I decided that you should write a blog about linguistics. So I made you one.’
Hm.
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