Author Archives: brinton

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, have researched the word “huh” – “a simple syllable with a low-front central vowel, glottal onset consonant, if any, and questioning intonation” – and found that it exists in widely … Continue reading →

Warning: potentially offensive language A Canadian is arguing in a Dubai court that in Canada f*** off is not swearing but just an emphatic way of telling someone to leave one alone: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/04/canadian-man-fights-strict-dubai-swearing-laws-by-arguing-f-off-is-not-an-insult-in-canada/

Professor Andrew Bryd of the University of Kentucky here recites the fable “The Sheep and the Horses” in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. This fable was composed in 1868 by the German linguist August Schleicher. Like the words and grammar of PIE, the … Continue reading →

The urge to correct others’ grammar may affect all of us at one time or another. An interesting article in slate.com discusses this issue: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2013/09/language_bullies_pedants_and_grammar_nerds_who_correct_people_all_the_time.single.html An edition of lexicon valley also discusses this issue with linguist John McWhorter: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/08/lexicon_valley_with_john_mcwhorter_on_why_prescriptivism_lives_in_all_of.html

The linguist David Crystal discusses and performs Shakespeare with his actor son Ben, using both modern (RP) and EModE (what they call “OP”) pronunciation in this 10-minute video: http://twentytwowords.com/2013/09/05/performing-shakespeares-plays-with-their-original-english-accent/

Stefan Dollinger recently spoke about what the Oxford English Dictionary should do to account for the fact that English is now spoken by more non-native speakers world-wide than it is by native speakers: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Oxford+English+Dictionary+mulls+what+gets+what+stays/8781779/story.html

Anne Curzan, a linguist at the University of Michigan, talks about marking students off for “grammatical errors”: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/08/14/dinging-for-grammatical-errors/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en This blog entry is part of “Lingua Franca” of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog with a number of good entries.

The writer in The Guardian believes that the word literally should be set aside (at least for a while), not only because it is used in a sense directly opposed to its original meaning (i.e., meaning ‘figuratively’), but also because it … Continue reading →

Although the Urban Dictionary has “obvious limitations”, it has been used as a source of information on current slang in a number of court cases: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/media/urban-dictionary-finds-a-place-in-the-courtroom.html?emc=eta1  

Here is a brief interview with John Simpson, outgoing editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/29/the-oxford-english-dictionary-the-original-crowdsourcer.html