Par Aude Bariéty. Quatre États américains permettent déjà ou envisagent d’autoriser leurs élèves à remplacer des cours de langues étrangères par des cours de code. Une mesure qui fait débat et contre laquelle s’élèvent notamment les professeurs de langues étrangères.
Français, espagnol, chinois ou… langage informatique? Voici le choix auquel les lycéens de quatre États américains sont déjà ou pourraient bientôt être confrontés, d’après Bloomberg Business. Le Texas a ainsi adopté dès 2013 un projet de loi permettant aux élèves de substituer leurs crédits de langue étrangère par du code. Suite...

By Ben Yagoda. I did a mental double take the first time I heard my wife, Gigi, say the word policeman. She gave the second and third syllables roughly equal stress and said -man with an ash sound (what was traditionally referred to as a short vowel), represented in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as /æ/. It came out the way I would say Batman or milkman. To me, the -man in policeman has a reduced stress and a schwa vowel (/ə/ in IPA), as in woman. More...

By Allan Metcalf. As warriors of the hard court advance from contest to contest in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, the names of the stages of the struggle follow a heroic poetic pattern going back beyond even the Old English age of Beowulf. This pattern is alliteration, the repetition not of the ends of words (as in rhyme) but the beginnings. More...

By William Germano. When Steve Easterbrook, the new chief executive of McDonald’s, recently announced his plans to adjust the chain’s offerings and operating assumptions, he couched his message in terms of the need to “align our food story around the consumer’s definition of quality and value.”
The locution food story is one kettle of fish, with or without tartar sauce and fries. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. A concerned Lingua Franca reader writes:
Perhaps it is just here in Gainesville, but I find that the radio reporters, especially those reporting weather, use the possessive pronoun when referring to time periods: “Your Friday will be sunny.” “It will be below freezing on your Monday night.” Is this modern usage? Does it happen in other places as well? Is it acceptable?
I’d noticed this particularly in robocalls and fund appeals from local arts charities—Support your Hartford Symphony! Support your candidate! Support your local NPR station!—almost always with the possessive pronoun emphasized. More...