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Like Son, Like Father
Readers who have been with me since 2004 may remember this post; if you found that one interesting, then you should have a look at this article from The New York Times.
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Two Stories on Language Ownership
Back in 2006, maybe you read the news stories about the Mapuche tribe in Chile suing Microsoft for translating Windows into their native language, Mapudungun, and the issue of language as intellectual...
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Ken Jennings and the Like a Racehorse Ambiguity
I learned today that Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings has a blog. I learned this when I saw a spike in my hits, from people that Jennings sent here to read Like a Racehorse. Thanks, Ken! And for the...
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Poisonous Syntax
Doug has recently been reading every book in Brian Jacques’s Redwall series that he can get his hands on. Earlier this week, he was telling me about scenes in several of the books in which one...
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December Links
Gabe Doyle at Motivated Grammar takes on the issue of who(m) vs. that to introduce relative clauses describing a human (or at least animate) being. He has gathered data, and found that both are used,...
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J. Philip Whitman Joins the Blogosphere
If you’ve read this blog from the beginning, you’ve heard about a guy who has… …teamed up with my brother to mess with me, with the word fring as their weapon of choice. …held forth on the proper usage...
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Welcome, Grammar Enthusiasts!
If you got here via the National Grammar Day website (hosted by Grammar Girl this year), welcome! Of course, that’s not to say you’re unwelcome if you arrived here some other way. I just meant … all I...
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RNW Example from 1813
Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic sent me the following message… All the examples I’ve seen for FLoP coordination on your site or Language Log have been fairly recent. I don’t know if the historical dimension...
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If I Just Lay Here
First of all, I think I have a pretty good handle on the currently standard system for English conditionals. I wrote about them most recently in July in this post. In my grammar, a sentence like If I...
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Dative Altercation
My brother Glen left a comment on my last post about syntactic tree diagrams, which I had illustrated with the sentences Brynn will say who stole the cookies and Who will Brynn say stole the cookies?...
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Getting on the Bae Train
Last March, while prowling through my son’s and his friends’ social media timelines (this is called “creeping,” by the way), I noticed the word bae starting to appear. “How long have people been saying...
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