Fish, barrel, content
Stanley Fish’s a column in this morning’s New York Times is Devoid of Content. No, that’s the headline. Now, it’s like shooting, um, well, look, I’m trying really hard not to be too snarky, OK? Prof. Fish doesn’t make it…
Category: Language Log
which that which
I know that not every Gentle Reader gets all het up about grammar. Well, as with Jon Carroll’s cats, you have been warned. Arnold Zwicky, over at language log, has been on a kick, lately, about the which/that rule. It…
Lex Hartmania
On the first of February last, Your Humble Blogger sent an email to Mark Liberman, of Language Log, in which I referred to Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation. Prof. Liberman made mention of it in a post two months later,…
b’pardon-
Mark Liberman was certain to catch my eye with a piece on the Language Log called Hartman’s Law Confirmed Again. However, other than the reference to Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (which, bye the bye, comes up first on a…
Lolly, Lolly, Lolly
Your Humble Blogger enjoyed Geoffrey Pullum’s Language Log note called Box Spaghetti Straight, in which he notes that “Box is a noun, spaghetti is a noun, straight is an adjective. Together they form an adjective phrase.” I love noun modifiers,…
Around the horn
OK, Your Humble Blogger is taking another five-day (or so) break, which means that it’s time to give up on writing actual essays on any of these: Trapper John over at The Next Hurrah posts that The NLRB is taking…
Around the Horn
I’ve seen a few things recently on-line that are interesting, but about which I don’t have enough to write an essay. So: From the Language Log, Arnold Zwicky writes about Two and Threes, specifically about the figure of speech taken…
Liberals, arts, colleges
I happened to see a New York Times article about two recent studies of the Liberal Professoriate (working paper versions are available of the two, How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities? Survey Evidence from Six Fields and…
Loopy
Over at the Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum was quite reasonably ticked at the sign indicating that bike racks are “only on westbound Loop shuttles”; the loop is in fact a loop, and westbound buses go east as well before…
What’s the frequency
While Your Humble Blogger is ruminating about the debate, Gentle Readers may want to peruse this note by Mark Liberman over at the Language Log. He uses an interesting tool to look at the words that one speaker used more…