Category: Uncategorized
Sixteen Months
All modesty aside, look how cute our boy is. (Photos below.) He is very cute. Cute, cute, cute, cute, cute, cute. 🙂 Progress continues apace. He is a talking machine. He probably knows more than 100 words. He learns words after you say them two or three times, and then he remembers them for good,…
Can bad language punditry be stopped? Can false attributions for classic quotes be fixed?
License revoked: Can bad language punditry be stopped?. Jan Freeman writes in the Boston Globe about her ideal world, in which journalists, commentators, and other public figures would double-check their facts before they go spreading misinformation about language, especially about word origins. Jan’s perspective is spot-on. There’s a laxness—an insufficient intellectual rigor—where it comes to…
There’s one in every country
Here’s my latest column from the Malaysia Star. … One of the things we know to be true about all languages is that they all have words for certain concepts and things, like mother, water and moon. The things everyone has, needs, or sees. There are also words for concepts and things that are less…
Scottish Language Dictionaries fundraiser
The Scottish Language Dictionaries program has had its funding withdrawn by the Scottish Arts Council. SLD, a charity, is responsible for the Dictionary of the Scots Language online (which offers at no charge the 22 volumes of the Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, and other works), the Concise Scots…
SouthWest Writers
A hat-tip to the SouthWest Writers’ group, which mentioned Double-Tongued Dictionary in its July-August newsletter. Thanks!
Disfluencies: What do they mean by “I mean”?
My latest column in the Malaysia Star. Note that these columns are written for an audience that may not speak English as a first language. In them I often explain things that are obvious to a native speaker of English but may not be to an English-learner. … One of the hardest things to get…
15 months
The boy is 15 months old today! Lately Guthrie talks up a storm, with lots of multiword sentences like “more cheese please” or “more book please.” He also likes to wash his hands and say “wash! wash!” and he’s lately fond of “mine! mine! mine!” He also has begun eating with utensils, including a fork,…
Fourteen months
The boy is 14 months old today! We’ll post more photos later but wanted to leave you with these from an eco-fair at the park this weekend.
A hearty endorsement of shout quotes: scare quotes used for emphasis
My latest column in the Malaysia Star has been posted. The column is based on a radio essay that I wrote in June 2007 but never aired. In short, I’m endorsing the use of quotation marks for emphasis. John McWhorter more or less agrees in a column he published in the New York Sun in…
How to buy a dictionary
It’s what you might call service journalism, but it’s something I’ve been seeing a need to write for a while: How to buy a dictionary, my latest column in the Malaysia Star. … A popular question from English language-learners and native speakers alike is, “What dictionary should I use or buy?” There are many bad…