blog posts

• 2015's word of the year is "autocorrect"

  Dec 31, 2014 1:00 am936 views

  The word of the year for 2015 is autocorrect. It may seem strange declaring the word of the year for a year that is only just starting. We’ve just named 2014’s word of the year, after all, and it is torture, because 2014 had plenty of that. But even though we tend to look back at the end of the year to the events that shaped it—the top ten news stories of the year, the films most annoying to North Korea, the best countries that have been invaded, the most significant airbag failures, the grammar rule most honored in the breach—at the end of the year we also start making predictions about the year to come: will politicians continue cozying up to white supremacists or will they be too busy smoking Cuban cigars? Will film makers see that featuring dictators in low brow comedies may put studio mainframes at risk, but it’s great for box office? Will dictators release their own annoying films depicting unpleasant things that might happen to Hollywood directors? Plus, autocorrect represents a highly-refined, first-world kind of torture, and considering what 2014 was like, some correction seems in order.

• A 300th birthday card for Samuel Johnson, the great English lexicographer

  Sep 13, 2009 1:35 am2711 views

  Sept. 18 is Samuel Johnson's 300th birthday. The English essayist, poet, novelist, and witty conversationalist whom we know mostly through the anecdotes recorded by his friend and biographer, James Boswell, and his other friends, became famous in his day for his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755.

• A Better Pencil, available now from Oxford University Press

  Aug 12, 2009 12:00 am1721 views

  Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself.

• A Brief History of Singular 'they'

  Jul 30, 2018 12:15 pm9920 views

  Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent—the word the pronoun refers to—is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like Everyone loves their mother.

  But that’s nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375 . . .

• Afghan government reaches impasse: can't decide whether to use the Pashtu or the Dari word for 'university'

  Aug 12, 2008 11:15 pm2020 views

  This week, as Afghanistan continued to outpace Iraq in the two countries' olympic race toward self-destruction, the Loya Jirga, or Afghan parliament, debated whether to use pohantun, the Pashtu word for 'university,' or daneshgah, the Dari word, in the new higher education law. Delegates also argued over which of the nation's two official languages should be used in class. 

  Pashtu, the majority language, is spoken in most of the country by the Pashtun, the traditional rulers of Afghanistan. Dari, related to Farsi, or Persian, is used mostly by those in the country's northwest who live closer to the Iran border.

  A reporter for a state-run newspaper was recently fined for using the Dari word for 'university' instead of the Pashtu one which is on Kabul University’s official seal.

• A language kept alive on life support, literally

  Jan 19, 2008 12:30 pm2749 views

  82 year old Soma Devi Dura is the last speaker of Dura, the traditional language of the Dura people living in the Western Region of Nepal. Soma Devi is mostly deaf and blind. She doesn’t feel like talking much, and according to Nepali actuarial tables, she may not last long. So one linguist wants to put Dura and its last surviving speaker on life support.
  
  As a boy, Kedar Bilash Nagila played with Dura children who had already lost their language. Now he’s a graduate student studying Dura, and he’s trying to take the last Dura speaker, who like many of the Dura is also named Dura, to the capital, Kathmandu, for medical treatment and a couple of hearing aids. Drugs should allow Soma Devi to hang on for a while. And with special audiological equipment she may be able to hear Nagila, who hopes she will add to the database of 1,500 Dura words and 250 sentences that he has already compiled in his effort to make sure that Dura survives after she’s gone.

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  A literal paradox: "literally" generally means 'figuratively'

  Oct 27, 2010 5:45 pm4315 views

  The English language is full of paradoxes, like the fact that "literally" pretty much always means 'figuratively.' Other words mean their opposites as well--"scan" means both 'read closely' and 'skim.' "Restive" originally meant 'standing still' but now it often means 'antsy.' "Dust" can mean 'to sprinkle with dust' and 'to remove the dust from something.' "Oversight" means both looking closely at something and ignoring it. "Sanction" sometimes means 'forbid,' sometimes, 'allow.' And then there's "ravel," which means 'ravel, or tangle' as well as its opposite, 'unravel,' as when Macbeth evokes "Sleepe that knits up the rauel'd Sleeue of Care."

• All bloggers are liars

  Oct 19, 2006 8:58 am1759 views

  The Cretan philosopher Epimenides is famous for his paradoxical statement, All Cretans are liars. The paradox is pretty clear. If hes from Crete and tells you that Cretans lie, then his statement is itself a lie. But if hes lying when he says that Cretans are liars, then.... As Gilbert and Sullivan put it, a paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.

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  All hail goddess English?

  Nov 4, 2010 11:00 pm3632 views

  Global English may be about to go celestial. A political activist in India wants the country's poorest caste to improve its status by worshipping the English language, and to start off he's building a temple to Goddess English in the obscure village of Bankagaon, near Lakhimpur Khiri in Uttar Pradesh.

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  Amazon Fail 2.0: Bookseller's Big Brother removes Orwell's Big Brother from Kindles everywhere

  Jul 18, 2009 12:45 am1840 views

  In a move worthy of George Orwell's Big Brother, Amazon.com sent its thought police into Kindles everywhere to erase copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm."

• Amazon Sales Rank: I'm being outsold by a book on tattoos

  Sep 24, 2009 1:45 pm1963 views

  My book "A Better Pencil" came out this month from Oxford University Press. It's not my first book, but it's the first one I've published since the internet went viral. Because my book is about the impact of computers and the 'Net on how we read and write, I checked the World Wide Web to see how the book was doing.

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  America’s War on Language

  Sep 3, 2014 6:30 pm25187 views

  It's the centennial of America's entry into World War I, time to take a closer look at one of its offshoots, America's little-known War on Language

  The United States declared war on Germany on April 7, 1917. In addition to sending troops to fight in Europe, Americans waged war on the language of the enemy at home. German was the second most commonly-spoken language in America, and banning it seemed the way to stop German spies cold. Plus, immigrants had always been encouraged to switch from their mother tongue to English to signal their assimilation and their acceptance of American values. Now speaking English became a badge of patriotism as well, a way to prove that you were not a spy.

  The war on language was fought on two fronts, one legal, the other, in the schools. Its impact was immediate and long-lasting. German was the target, but the other “foreign” tongues suffered collateral damage. Immigrant languages in America went into decline, and there was a precipitous drop in the study of foreign languages in US schools as well. 

• A million English words, or only 600,000? Either way, it's a language packed with more words than you'll ever need

  Jul 8, 2008 9:30 pm4347 views

  Paul Payack, professional word-counter and the founder of Global Language Monitor and yourdictionary.com, claims that someone coins an English word every 98 minutes, which seems pretty fast until we consider that during the word-coining frenzy of the 1590s, when the pace of life was slower, about 10,000 new words popped up every year.  If Shakespeare and his contemporaries never slept, that comes to a neologism every 52 minutes.  

  With more than 326 million native speakers of English today, and only 2 million in 1600, today's neologism-per-person rate is only a fraction of what it was 400 years ago.  Given our perception that the pace of life has increased dramatically since the Renaissance, this suggests that while there are in fact more words in English now than there used to be, we have a lot less time to coin them (neologism, a word, coined in France in the 1730s and borrowed by English in the 1770s, meaning ‘a new word’; Renaissance, a mid-19th century word meaning the European revival of arts and letters of the 14th - 16th centuries). 

• A modest proposal: Don't make English official, ban it instead

  Mar 2, 2007 9:45 am2634 views

  Once again the House of Representatives is considering legislation to make English the official language of the United States. Supporters of the measure say that English forms the glue that keeps America together. They deplore the dollars wasted translating English into other languages. And they fear a horde of illegal aliens adamantly refusing to acquire the most powerful language on earth.

• A new pronoun. Again?

  Nov 28, 2006 11:15 am2306 views

  There’s a new gender-neutral pronoun in town.  Hu – an epicene replacement for he and she –has been in the news, but so far it’s not on many people’s tongues, and while hu has appeared in print, it’s not likely to catch on any time soon.  

  Most of our pronouns are gender-neutral: I, you, we,they, me, our, them, us,it.  But there are two exceptions: he and she.  Normally this is not a problem, since he and she are incredibly useful words.  But sometimes the lack of an epicene third-person pronoun causes us to produce sentences like these:  

  (1)  Everyone loves his mother.

  (2)  Everyone loves their mother.

  (3)  Everyone loves his or her mother.