Category Archives: Language

No, in fact, languages don’t want that

Posted on January 24, 2012

Because they are incapable of wanting anything. Earlier I remarked that Geoffrey Pullum, Ph.D., professional linguist, ardent descriptivist, and language blagger extraordinaire surely didn’t really think this but wrote it in Language Log posts for rhetorical effect: that languages want … Continue reading →

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On correctness, ambiguity, and precision in language

Posted on January 17, 2012

In the linguistics blagosphere last week, prescriptivists got all indignant because some British company I’d never heard of, Waterstone’s, dropped the apostrophe from its name, and descriptivists got all agitated at the prescriptivists for making undue proclamations about correctness, rules, … Continue reading →

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“Times” and “folds”

Posted on January 15, 2012

Bill Walsh is absolutely, completely, 100%, unequivocally, and in all other ways right in his position on the meanings of “times” and “fold” in his recent disagreement that is as much mathematical as it is semantic. If I start with … Continue reading →

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Young American female vowel shift

Posted on January 14, 2012

In a recent post about a different topic, Bill Walsh mentions some annoying vowel shifts exhibited by young-ish American females. These mainly involve changing the short e to the short u sound, so that “desk”, “test”, and “better” become “dusk”, … Continue reading →

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Sure vs. certain

Posted on September 29, 2010

Without reading the title of this post, if you were asked to give a synonym of “sure”, wouldn’t your answer most likely be “certain”? And vice versa? In most cases, these words are identical and interchangeable. But these cases are … Continue reading →

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