Blogs about Language

We all know when someone is listing something in a speech, but what is it about the intonation that tells us a list is happening? I had always thought there was a particular intonation contour …

official-linguistics-post:dedalvs:jv:council-of-beetroot:People should use this text embellishment more𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟Holy shit this is unicode???𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 …

Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon …

After a soldier enlists in the Israeli army, there are two words to describe him (or her, although I'm providing the male forms of the words): טִירוֹן tiron - "new recruit" and טוּרַאי turai - …

I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by …

Hello, and welcome to Old Fritinancy — Classic Fritinancy? — the blog I launched in 2006. In August 2023 I made the transition to the Substack platform, where I’m publishing new writing on names, brands, …

1. Academic rumours Careful scholarship is supposed to protect us from chains of whispers, where texts get distorted via paraphrase and summary so that secondary and tertiary works fail to accurately convey the sense of …

This book is a very nicely written novel, with gorgeous descriptions of a quiet, provincial life, offering glimpses into the lives of northern German landed gentry of the late 1800s.

Following on from my post about setting up my kids with a Raspberry Pi 400 as their first computer, here I share how I’ve made the system easy to manage remotely and how I imposed …

Start with something simple. We've got the verb give, which we all know, and the thing that you give is a gift. They're quite obviously related. This is Not Interesting.Then you've got people who use …

The original: se non si puote amare senza prima mirare, bella a che d’invecchiar sì vi dolete? Invecchiando più amata anco sarete: a rimirar il sol la vista è pronta più che nel mezzo dì, …

In an episode of "Chadian Wisdom and Proverbs", Yaqub Muhammad Musa discusses three Mubi proverbs, providing the Mubi versions along with translation and extensive commentary in Arabic. Mubi is comparatively well-documented as East Chadic languages …

I always perk up when I see that the New Yorker has a piece by John McPhee, and this one (archived) is the latest in his “Tabula Rasa” series of reminiscences. It is (needless to …

…or maybe I should say, "is deeply stupid, so far". At least, that's the verdict from my first encounter with this heralded innovation. I updated a Chromebook, re-installed Linux, and thought (incorrectly) that I might …

A collection notable of names that appeared for the very first time last year Raphtalia, Roulette, Hari American baby names never stand still. Last year, 661 girls’ names from Aani to Zynnia made their debuts …

Going length by length (e.g., 2 letters long, 3 letters long, 4 letters long…), what were last year’s most popular baby boy names? Before we get to the lists, a few quick facts: The most …

In the very early days of this blog, I did a post on “erm,” which I took and still take to be the British version of the American “um,” with similar pronunciation. (That is, the …

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the …

‘Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot) Banjaxed and bockety are a fun pair of words in the Irish English vernacular. Banjaxed I heard from …

Inspired by Anatoly Liberman's Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (which I've reviewed for the International Journal of Lexicography), here's a quick dip into some ways of saying one's going to …