either either

"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific thin...

over there

Part of a series begun in World War II for American GIs going abroad, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam was intended to introduce them to the custo...

Yesterday

Gestern wurde ein Humalog KwikPen vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Mammut vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Ring vergessen.  Gestern wurde ein Gebild...

ipse dixit (allegedly)

1. Mr. Chicago Hates Hyphens What’s wrong with hyphens?  Mr. Chicago hates them, loathes them, despises them.  He hates them so much that h...

Siu Kam Wen

¿QUÉ SIGNIFICA PARA TI, UN CHINO DE PRIMERA GENERACIÓN, ESCRIBIR EN ESPAÑOL? ¿HAS INTENTADO HACERLO EN CANTONÉS O EN MANDARÍN? Comencé a...

I went to Meeting this morning at the Society of Friends in Planckstraße.  I got there very early; the woman who greeted me, Gisela Faust, t...

will have had gone

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming you...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

(I was reminded of the fact that there are people who honestly believe that if a speaker of British English had a moment of extreme emotion...

It's not just lexical. You can walk — or run, crawl, scurry, roll, etc. — out the gate, out the back, out the exit, etc. You can look —...

no more fried ants jokes

the age of an individual is not measured chronologically in Amondawa culture, which lacks a numerical system able to enumerate above four. ...

unable to understand basic sentences

Overall, I found the experiments fairly convincing. I do worry a bit about what some colleagues and I used to call "the paper airplane...

crash blossoms

I figured that my example, a news headline containing the extraordinarily garden-path-leading word sequence proposed to by a lightning strik...

mind-reading fatigue revisitedl

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests to gauge people's reactions when exposed to four background noise settings...

the house style

Mark Liberman finds a site, Onlinestylebooks.com , that lets you search 43 stylebooks at once: Surveying this explicit variety of sources ma...

continent cut off

Mark Liberman discusses 'beg the question' on Language Log. A commenter chips in. As to whether 'begs the question' is an a...

Legolanguage

“Can you see any clippy bits?” my son asked his friend. The friend was flummoxed. “Do you mean handy bits?” he asked, pointing. “Yes,” repli...

the pleasures and sorrows of singular they

Are you an excellent primary teacher who prides themselves in their method of delivery of the national curriculum? If so, a cool job awaits:...

let x = x

Andrew Gelman drew my attention to his latest post on different kinds of suspense. Wrote a looooooooong comment which turned out to have mi...

big girl's blouse

(thinking of writing apologetic e-mail re still unfinished review, along the lines of 'sorry to be such a big girl's blouse', I ...

particles

Technology makes it easier to jump from corpus to corpus, and it makes it possible to take advantage of analysis above the word level. And b...