By Lucy Ferriss. Nineteen fifty-four, the year of my birth,* witnessed Brown v. Board of Education, Elvis Presley’s first successful song, mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine, Hank Aaron’s first major league baseball game, and the coining of the word nowheresville. That last is according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s new Birthday Word Generator, linked to the date when OED researchers have been able to locate the first usage of a term. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. Not long ago, I attended a conference at Radcliffe on “Ways With Words: Exploring Language and Gender.” The first, and perhaps most salient, thing to note is that this conference was packed. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. I first heard the word in an Elvis Presley song, “In the Ghetto,” released not long after the Billy Joe Royal song “Down in the Boondocks.” I remember comparing the lyrics. “And his hunger burns,” Presley crooned of his “hungry little boy,”
so he starts to roam the streets at night
and he learns how to steal and he learns how to fight
In the ghetto
Billy Joe Royal’s boy was no less poor but more hopeful, counting on love and hard work to move him from the “boondocks” to a place “on the hill.”
I think I understood, then, that Presley’s boy was black. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. Like others in this forum, I try to keep abreast of changes in idiom over time. We notice the emergence of vocal fry, the increasing acceptance of singular they, and so on. But for the most part, our observations are those of the disinterested listener. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. I spent part of spring break serendipitously immersed in language. We were on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (the “Rich Coast,” as Puerto Rico is the “Rich Port,” neither of which description seems apt these days), among a group of international visitors. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Facebook was in the news last week for introducing a choice of five emoji you can use to tag a post or other online object that inspires some emotion in you. Formerly, your only recourse was the thumbs-up icon of the Like button: You could tag an item to say “Like!,” which might mean you agreed with it, you were amused by it, you were moved emotionally by it, you hope others will look at it, or any number of other things. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Sometimes (in fact quite often) Mark Liberman says things at Language Log that make me want to paint them on the side of the barn. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. One very specific desire I have is to reach the end of my life (a long time from now) without ever having used the phrase working closely with. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. For grammar bullies “the subjunctive” is sacred ground. Reforms proposed for the British national curriculum in 2012 required teaching use of the subjunctive not later than sixth grade. People seem to think the subjunctive is a fragile flower on which civilization depends; without our intervention it will fade and die, and something beautiful, fragile, and important will be lost. More...
By Ilan Stavans. “It will be like catching butterflies in the dark,” a colleague of mine commented.
He was talking about my signing up to teach a course called “Shakespeare in Prison” at the Hampshire County Jail, in Northampton, Mass. More...
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