I Beg to Differ
Dear Language Nerd, What’s the difference between “begging the question” and “raising the question”? I was with a colleague yesterday and he was going on about how furious he was that people use the two interchangeably. I didn’t know why it mattered so I just nodded and grimaced at appropriate times. Please help, I am […]
A Loo By Any Other Name
Dear Language Nerd, Why are toilets called “lavatories” on airplanes, and never called that anywhere else? -S.K. *** Dear S.K., This post is gonna be like failing at eating a Reeses peanut butter cup. We’ll pull off the little wrapper thingy, and nibble all the way around the edges, and scrape the chocolate off the […]
A Historic Opportunity to Stop Saying “An Historic&...
Dear Language Nerd, Why do news anchors and the like say “an historic occasion” when they would never say “an history book”? -JRS *** Dear Jurs, Because it’s fancier. But not because it’s right. First, let’s go over what the “a/an” rule really is, and super-double-first, let’s go over what it isn’t: it isn’t a […]
To Coin a Phrase
So the other night I thought I heard [a friend] say “She was druncating all over the place.” I heard wrong. But I want to register “druncate” as a new word please. Can you take care of this, [Language Nerd]? -Delphine *** Follow-up example after request for clarification: “We had to drag Stella out of […]
Useful Turkish Phrases
Hey Language Nerd, I’m about to head to Turkey to visit my goofy sister and was hoping for a bit of help. Can you craft a list of useful phases (how to be polite, purchase things, and whatnot)? I don’t want to just hop on over there and be a total goober to the locals. […]
The Curious Linguistics of the Doge in the Internet
If the doge meme is just a big pile of broken grammar rules, why did it look so off when a couple months ago a politician used it in an ad? How is it possible to get doge wrong? And is doge going to die someday (soon?), or could it become part of regular language? […]
Doge Corpus
A corpus of the text found in the most popular images for “doge” on imgur on 23 February 2014. My article based on this is here. I went with imgur rather than reddit or tumblr for two reasons — many of the reddit/tumblr doge images are stored there, and it’s easy to search . The […]
Sound It Out, Part 3: Phoning It In
Part 1 (A Matter of Some Consonants) is here. Part 2 (Disemvoweled) is here. Remember several thousand words ago when somebody asked me if all languages use the same sounds? And then I went and inventoried all the sounds that English has? Now finally – FINALLY – we can use that knowledge to contrast English […]
Sound It Out, Part 2: Disemvoweled
Part 1 (A Matter of Some Consonants) is here. Alright. Vowels. Much like last time, in this part we’re going to go over how English vowels work, so that next time we can talk about what other languages do differently. (No, I haven’t forgotten the original question, and we will get there… eventually.) In the […]
Shady Business
Hey Art Nerd, I have taken up sketching recently, and I’m getting better at line work. The shapes are starting to come out on the page like they are in my head, know what I mean? But I’m having a hell of a time trying to show what things are supposed to be. How do […]