Tongue Stuck
It was a kind of madness to speak a language to my son that I hadn’t used in almost a decade.
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Posts Tagged: linguistics
Touching What Once Was: A Conversation with Meredith Clark
Meredith Clark discusses her debut lyric memoir, LYREBIRD.
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Disrupting Language Hierarchies: Talking with Judith Santopietro
Judith Santopietro discusses TIAWANAKU. POEMAS DE LA MADRE COQA/POEMS FROM THE MOTHER COQA.
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Losing the World
When we begin life, language is play.
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Understanding the Language of Female Breakups
Female friendship, however necessary it is in our lives, and for all the joy it brings us, for all its love and support and kindness and generosity, can be a real mindf***k when it ends.
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The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby talks about his debut novel The Zero and the One, the challenges of pacing and plot, and the fun of inventing a book of philosophy for the novel.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dipika Mukherjee
Telling a human story, with individuals experiencing the effects of an actual political issue—that’s my part in shaking the ground.
...moreDefining Writing
For JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu examines the long-conflicting ideas of whether writing is a form of technology or a separate dialect of its spoken form. Luu references the upcoming film Arrival and the sci-fi novella it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, which takes a linguist’s point of view in telling its […]
...moreTrolls Gonna Troll
We don’t like being told “no.” At least not according to preliminary votes from Oxford Dictionaries’ attempt to collect data on English speakers’ least favorite words in late August. Unfortunately, while the publishers of the OED did get a number of legitimate responses, they shut down the contest after one day because Internet users can’t help […]
...moreThe Newest Euphemisms
John McWhorter writes for Aeon about the evolution of euphemisms, one of the functions in a language that evolves quicker than any other.
...moreSigning off on the Future
For Hyperallergic, Allison Meier covers design ideas for nuclear waste warning signs, with scientists and artists around the world attempting to design warning signs that would deter humans 10,000 (or even 100,000) years in the future from digging up our buried nuclear waste.
...moreSearching for Your Next Band Name
For JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at the “my next band name” meme to identify not just trends in pairing interesting words, but also the social phenomenon of how we understand what words mean.
...moreEnglish Is Not Dying, You Elitists
Pop linguist Gretchen McCulloch unpacks the many wrongful assumptions about language behind the idea that emojis will cause the “death” of the English language: No, English is in ruddy good health. In fact, it’s not only not under threat, it’s the aggressor. The only problem with English is the way it’s pushing out thousands of […]
...moreWomen Shouldn’t Stop Saying ‘Sorry’
At The Establishment, Amelia Shroyer pushes back against the idea that women must self-police their language in order to sound more ‘professional’ (read: like men): Society has always valued the words of men more than those of women, to the point that men have been credited for discoveries or milestones actually reached by women, and […]
...moreThe Fine Point of Communication
At Aeon, Thom Scott-Phillips compares words and images, literature and visual art, to reveal their complementary nature in getting to the point.
...moreThe Person to Whom Things Happen
The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated. How do we understand our own suffering—with what words and to what ends? For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal questions the terminology we use when talking about sexual assault: from “victim” to “survivor,” either term a kind of interpellation […]
...moreThe Sound of White Flight
Over at Catapult, Kashana Cauley explores the origins of the Midwestern accent and discovers its roots in racial segregation: Apparently it wasn’t enough for GLVS [Great Lakes Vowel Shift] speakers to move very far away from minorities in order to avoid us: They desperately needed to adopt a nasal accent to make sure they didn’t […]
...moreLosing Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at language loss in victims of trauma, specifically trauma in wartime. Luu’s case studies range from a monolingual teenaged prisoner isolated in Guantanamo Bay to POWs in Russia isolated from their native cultures and first languages for decades at a time.
...moreThe Singular They
For the New York Times, Amanda Hess gives us a brief history of the increasingly prominent and ambiguously-gendered singular they, from usage in Shakespeare to Girls and The Argonauts.
...moreDigging Deep into a Jawn
The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people…. It is a word without boundaries or […]
...moreHow to Write Emoji
For Guernica, Elisa Gabbert explores the incorporation of emoji into language and fiction. Gabbert also addresses the idea of diachronic translations, i.e. translating fiction from one historical era to another, and what place hyper-specific contemporary technology like emoji have in fiction.
...moreExamining the Dictionary for Sexism
We need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts…And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that we exist within that tension, and to not always hide behind the idea of descriptivist lexicography Over at the New Yorker, Nora Caplan-Bricker compiles stories […]
...moreThe Art of Inventing Language
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the popularity of invented languages, ranging from the mystical language created by a 12th century abbess to contemporary constructed languages such as Esperanto and Klingon. Invented languages found in literature are really examples of linguistic artistry, language for art’s sake, not necessarily for real world utility or universality…. […]
...moreIt’s Literally Fine
At the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance defends teenagers’ ever-maligned contributions to the lexicon, citing a recent student that examines the extent to which teens influence linguistic change: And the thing about linguistic changes is they can’t exactly be stopped in any sort of deliberate way…Even old-school grammar geeks are warming up to “they” as an acceptable […]
...moreThe Making of the OED
The Oxford English Dictionary, the first comprehensive catalog of the English language, took seventy years to compile. Volunteers aided the project, and one of the biggest contributors happened to be a murderer who lived in an insane asylum: Through the years, the OED’s editor had enlisted hundreds of volunteers around the English-speaking world, and probably […]
...moreFor Everybody
…you ask them, ‘Why are you so upset?’, and they can’t answer you. For the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphael talks to linguist David Crystal about our age of abbreviation.
...moreIn Defense of Precisely Inexact Language
Writing for Aeon, Elijah Millgram uses 1984 and George Orwell’s Newspeak/doublethink idea of language to examine why imperfect language, and expression that is sometimes inexact, contradictory, or misleading, can be better for developing the scope of human reasoning.
...moreDoes Anyone Speak English Here?
At Aeon, John McWhorter explores the twists and turns through English’s linguistic history that brought us the “deeply peculiar” language structure used today.
...moreThe (Im)Purity of Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu makes a case for emphasizing grammar rules that follow popular usage, rather than the pedantic standards set by centuries-dead classicists. Here are the plain facts: many of these pop grammar rules… were magically pulled out of thin air by a handful of 18th and 19th century prescriptive grammarians…. Often […]
...moreThe Last of Their Words
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the rapid extinction of the world’s languages and linguists’ efforts to preserve these dying languages for future generations. On the surface, there isn’t anything wrong with people wanting to communicate with each other in a language they all understand. A global language certainly has its advantages…. In the […]
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