One criticism of Our Only President back when he was just One Candidate for the Republican Party’s Nomination was that he was … intellectually incurious. On the other hand, he spoke fluent Spanish! Or, well, no, he didn’t really. Anyway,…
Clearly, Your Humble Blogger will never again have the opportunity to devote a period of sustained concentration to thinking, or for that matter to typing. I am just about able to bookmark the odd thing of interest, to indicate to…
Bill Poser over at the Language Log alerts me to the story about the Black Mountains Smokery at Crickhowell in Powys. It seems that the Powys County Council Trading Standards was required to inform the company that the packaging of…
There’s a sort of misconception running around—there! Get it! Quick! Damn, it got—there it goes! Ahem. Many people seem to think that having one’s sympathies with the descriptivists rather than the prescriptivists means that you can’t make fun of people’s…
What YHB should probably do is knock out a half-dozen Book Reports, just because being so far behind makes the thing seem more like a chore and less like a treat. Particularly since my shallow reading habits force books to…
Via a Language Log entry, an attempt on Listable to list the Best Last Lines of English-Language novels. Of course, the Best is “a far, far better thing” from A Tale of Two Cities. This suffers a bit from being…
Five Things I Have Been Persuaded to Change My Mind about Since College: Note: These are not things that I have changed my mind about due to exposure (such as a newfound fondness for Early Music or the realization that…
I am awfully fond of the boys over at the Language Log, despite my occasional complaints about them. One of the things that I like about them is their ability to maintain a posture of astonished outrage each time a…
Given only a small amount of time at the computer these days, YHB has spent way way too much of it enjoying the discussion of thee and thuh over at the Language Log. Since the conversation has become wide-ranging, David…
As Your Humble Blogger has a moment, but not much more: Arnold Zwicky at Language Log notes today’s annoying bureaucratic noun-noun compound: Newsrack Ordinance Compliance Violation Warning and Impoundment Notice: Corrective Action Required. This is pretty impressive. Although really there…