I have an unpleasant acquaintance, an American learning Chinese. He was mocking another student of Chinese, a woman with a Southern accent, saying the accent carried over into her (advanced) Chinese, “Neeeee haa-yoh,” and so on. I don’t know her, and I don’t know Chinese, but this really burns me up. So my question for […]
For once, the Language Nerd is asking the questions, not answering them! I’m joined by Bianca Clarke, a hip-hop artist from Mobile, Alabama, and the winner of both Hottest Female Mixtape and Hottest Breakout Artist at the 2015 Alabama Music Awards. She sat down with me to talk about language, hip-hop, and the language of […]
Dear Language Nerd, When I write sweet lyrics for phat beats, I write in patterns. Specifically, the rhyming word at the end of my lines is based on basic 4/4 rhythm. Here is how I write them, where every letter is a matching rhyme word: A A A A (cat, hat, stat, plat (ypuss)) A […]
Dear Language Nerd, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking tell me that robots are going to kill me and take my job – and now they’re grading the GRE?! NOOOOO! Bill Riales *** Dear Bill, I hate to tell you this, but not only is a robot involved in GRE grades, it’s exactly the kind of […]
In the last post I was asked where “drop the hammer” comes from. Turns out, there wasn’t an easy answer floating around already — it took serious digging. Dunno why I was digging for a floating answer, but that’s how these things work out sometimes. Below, I’ve set up the “drop the hammer” hits from […]
Does “drop the hammer” come from guns? Carlos *** Dear Carlos, Yes and no. Or rather, sometimes. I started out thinking this would be a breezy etymological jaunt, but nope – ended up in corpus research. Which is cool, since I’ve done plenty of etymology lately. I’m going to go through my steps and missteps, […]
Dear Language Nerd, What’s the word for when you mishear something and make up a new word for it? Acorn something? Delphine *** Dear Delphine, You’re looking for eggcorn, which is itself an eggcorn of “acorn.”* An eggcorn is a reinterpretation of a word or phrase. Something with an obscure meaning is changed to something […]
i want to learn japanese but i cant understand the alphabet :((( *** Dear Anonymous Would-be Otaku, First the good news: no need to beat yourself up for not getting the Japanese alphabet – there ain’t one! So no worries there. Now the less-god news: there are two syllabaries and a whole slew of logograms […]
Hey, Language Nerd. I’m editing something and I need some help. How would I explain why we don’t say things like “going to eating” without leaving room for other mistakes like “let me to paint”? -Rhone *** Dear Rhone, It’s tough. First we need to get into our complements. A finite complement specifies a time: […]
Dear Language Nerd, I know a bunch of people with the last names Blue, Brown, or White, but outside of Reservoir Dogs I never heard of a Mr. Pink or Mr. Orange. Why are some colors normal names and others not? -Freddy Fuchsia (I wish) *** Dear Rainbow Authority, To really explain this, I gotta […]