Language is fine; people are the problem It is neither rational nor moral to suggest that words have some—let me risk lifting a word from Dr. Hart’s field—ousia or Platonic essence. Words mean only what people choose them to mean. That is precisely why nice no longer means “lewd.” Transpire came to mean something in [...]

This Fark.com thread is making me all sorts of stupid happy right now. The arguments about memeology (is that correct?) are funny, but the whole Glenn Beck “controversy” is pure gold. Father_Jack 2009-10-21 02:29:18 PM An-Unnecessarily-Long-Name: So you are saying its ok to take out an add in your hometown Newspaper saying you raped and [...]

Today’s OED Word of the Day: narcocracy, n. 1. A body of people responsible for the implementation of drug laws. rare. 1983 National Rev. (Nexis) 29 Apr. 492 The National Research Council report of June 21, 1982..was promptly suppressed by the narcocracy because it questions the efficacy of marijuana prohibition and advocates complete decriminalization and [...]

His online company www.lakeballs.co.uk have been retailing “lake balls” for almost 10 years, but even his powers of retrieval would be challenged by the monstrous task of recovering balls from the bottom of loch. Lake Balls sounds like a medical condition. I’m actually a bit disappointed it’s not Loch Balls. By my own code of [...]

How Schools Fail Democracy A principal cause of this catastrophic educational failure has been the dominance within the school world of a faulty how-to theory of language mastery. Full membership in any speech community and in any democracy involves mastery not just of grammar and pronunciation, but also of commonly shared knowledge—often unspoken and unwritten—that [...]

Logic and language are not the same thing It’s difficult for us to imagine what our mental lives would be like without language. Some theorists have even gone so far as to argue that language and logical thought are one and the same thing. A new brain imaging study challenges this notion by showing that [...]

Little guy gets stuck with homeless camp in Sacramento: “Merin said he has no ‘animus’ toward Hernandez. He called it a coincidence that he had filed the prior suit against Hernandez and now has sited a homeless camp behind his home.” I’m not sure if it’s more in poor taste or simply unprofessional to single [...]

On Language – Bierce’s Bugbears And after all, why would we? We still read Conrad, Austen and Swift, a century or three later, without much difficulty; it’s reasonable to assume that the usage nits of their times were more or less the ones we’re still picking today. Reasonable but not true, as Ambrose Bierce recently [...]

Grammar pet peeves: ”Across the world. Last time I checked, the world was still round. You don’t go across something round, you go around it.” ”Refer back, revert back, return back. I guess folks don’t understand that the re- prefix means back, again, anew.” ”Wa-lah. I’m not sure how it is spelled, because it is [...]

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let’s take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” [...]