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Descriptively Adequate: February 2010

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Newsflash: language peeves potentially irritable. Coming across the twitter tubes this morning (via @jillianp. This story out of New Zealand: " Research could dismay English language purists. In other news, "Water is wet", "Vegetarians not so keen on meat", etc. etc. I shouldn't mock the bit of news that prompted this piece: a USD $400K grant to do a massive morphological survey of English. this could be incredibly useful. it's just the "context" that the writer put it in. gems like:. Oh well, we all kno...

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Descriptively Adequate: May 2012

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What's in a language's name? A few weeks ago we held the 7th edition of the Semantics of Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas. The name of the language in the language itself. Are), i wonder which ones they will peg as constructed? I feel like Q'aanjob'al may trick them along the lines of space opera, and the all caps neo-orthography of SENĆOŦEN and the very non-English consonant clusters of Lnuismk could be a trap too. Posted by Ed Cormany. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom).

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Descriptively Adequate: May 2008

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Don't mention this one. A strange coincidence of events just occurred.  i was walking home from campus, where i had been working on a paper on some bizarre control phenomena, when "Pipe Dream" by the now-sadly-defunct Trendy. Came up on my ipod.  the first sentence of the song is:. Would it be all right / if i asked a deaf guy / to borrow his headphones? Yeah, that's PRO, in a clause introduced by ask. Posted by Ed Cormany. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). View my complete profile.

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Descriptively Adequate: 'only' peeving on the comics

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Only' peeving on the comics. I read all of my daily comic strips online now. one of the serious downsides to this is that gocomics.com has a comments thread(! On every single strip that they post. they don't generate the same type of bottom-dwelling stuff as youtube comments, but they are some of the most mirthless places on the internet. nothing is worse than going all Van Hœt. On Jan Freeman's blog Throw Grammar From The Train. Despite the fact that English doesn't work that way. So the " only. Makes t...

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Descriptively Adequate: January 2012

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Only' peeving on the comics. I read all of my daily comic strips online now. one of the serious downsides to this is that gocomics.com has a comments thread(! On every single strip that they post. they don't generate the same type of bottom-dwelling stuff as youtube comments, but they are some of the most mirthless places on the internet. nothing is worse than going all Van Hœt. On Jan Freeman's blog Throw Grammar From The Train. Despite the fact that English doesn't work that way. So the " only. Makes t...

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Descriptively Adequate: December 2011

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Yesterday, Mignon Fogarty. Posted a link to " The 20 Most Controversial Rules in the Grammar World. On Google . sufficiently baited, i read through it. as i did, i noticed that "The Grammar World" is a very vast place, and may in fact encompass several galaxies. I went through the list a second time to categorize each of these alleged "grammar" points in terms of what linguistic realm they fall under. (several fail to qualify for any linguistic subfield.) here were the results. Hanged" vs. "hung". Contai...

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Descriptively Adequate: January 2013

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In the past week i have seen two different signs, in two restrooms separated by several hundred miles, one typed and one handwritten, that both said:. Do not put paper towels in the toilet! It clogs them up. That should be the other way around: They clog it up. The paper towels are the clog-ers, not the clog-ees. how did such a complete mix-up escape from the pens of two people who are presumably competent speakers of English, if not native speakers? The misfortune lies in the fact that it clogs them up.

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Descriptively Adequate: The Office on whomever

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The Office on whomever. Thanks to the magic of the dvr, i just finished watching last night's episode of The Office. there was a brilliantly written scene in which Ryan's usage of whomever. Let's break down how this argument goes:. Michael: No, whomever. Is never actually right. Amazingly we start off the whole debate with what could only be characterized as antihypercorrection. Or maybe hyperanticorrection). usually whomever. Forms when they're the complement of a preposition or the complementizer for.

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Descriptively Adequate: December 2009

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Seek and ye shall not find. Morphological revelations on my morning comb through twitter and facebook statuses:. Just so we're clear: The past tense form of "to seek" is "sought" not "seeked" as 2/3 of my World History class seems to believe. That brings me to my "whoa" moment. i just hadn't realized that 'seek' was possibly on the cusp of regularization. so the question is, how does 'seek'/'sought' stack up to other verbs with past tense forms in -ought. And our test case, sought. Anyhow, to wrap this u...

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Descriptively Adequate: January 2010

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Give and take: math and linguistics. This is a response to the excellent post " Why Linguists Should Study Math. Over at The Lousy Linguist. Which i found via fellow Cornellian @nmashton. On twitter. i was going to just write a comment there, but i realized that it would probably become rather long. Simply: there is a grave asymmetry in linguists learning math versus mathematicians (or statisticians, or computer scientists, etc.) learning linguistics. So what's the big problem? Wrong as has been shown ti...