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. […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dear Language Nerd, What do the names of the days mean? Ok, “Sunday” I think I can guess, but “Tuesday”? Is “Friday” related to French fries? -Katon Lannis *** Dear Katon, Last year at this time, I talked about the meanings of the names of the months, so it seems apropos to start off 2014 […]
Dear Language Nerd, I know what a British biscuit is, but I gather that the American version is different. Are they a kind of scone? And why the change in meaning across the pond? Victoria *** Dear Victoria, Most of the differences between British and American vocabulary amount to mild amusements. “Tee hee, you go […]
Dear Language Nerd, What is it called when you add a special ending to a word to make a new word? Like “intuit” + “tion” = “intuition.” Thanks, Cole *** Dear Cole, Ok. First I’m going to answer the question you think you asked. Then I’m going to answer the question you really asked. Hope […]
Dear Language Nerd, You’re learning Turkish faster than me and it’s pissing me off. How can I learn it faster when my memory is so bad? From Your Roommate, Sal *** Dear Sal, No worries, roomie, here are my rad tips for vocabulary learnin’. Today, we’ll focus on vocab, not grammar or politeness or other […]
Dear Language Nerd, Sometimes when I am writing I use colloquialisms, but they can be obtuse. Sometimes they don’t feel right, but I don’t know why. What the heck is a colloquialism and why should I care? Pete S. P.S. – I find hand-drawn pictures are a very useful means to communicate language-related insight. *** Dear […]