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The Real Thing
I sometimes start my fiction-writing class off with an icebreaking exercise stolen from NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me. I call it “Bluff the Class” (cf. “Bluff the Listener”), and its purpose is to...
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Something Incomprehensible
Sitting on the runway at Dulles, about to fly up to State College on one of United’s Dash-8s, I found myself behind two rows of university students, one on each side of the plane. It was the day of the...
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What a Game
I told myself I was going to take a break from posts about language and politics after the election, but Robert Lehrman’s recent “Draft” column in The New York Times changed my mind. Mr. Lehrman wrote...
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Third-World Blues
Floridians waiting to vote. Credit: the Associated Press Judging from a spate of recent references, we may soon reach the point where, to paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the third world and it is...
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Reading Denzel Washington in English 141
A few years ago, following a stunningly silent moment in a class discussion, my creative-writing students let me know that race was indeed a taboo topic on campus, at least in polite conversation. (To...
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Information, Please
The major ink the Obamas’ fist-bump cover gets in Wikipedia’s “New Yorker” entry suggests one of the problems with crowd-sourced reference works. Allan Metcalf recently reported in this space that...
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Slinging Southpaw Lingo
I broke my right wrist over the Thanksgiving holiday and am clad in a cream-colored cast up to the elbow. Being right-handed, I’m finding it dodgy to correct student papers, grade exams, etc., at the...
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Poetry in the Marketplace
Apollo, god of poetry, courtesy of Stephen Vincent My friend Stephen Vincent, a Bay Area poet and raconteur, was in Turkey last summer and snapped a picture of the sculpture of Apollo at Nemrut just as...
View ArticleI Guess ‘It’s a Thing’
A couple of weeks back, NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a piece about the word random. It definitely was something I would be expected to like. After all, I am the NPR guy di tutti NPR guys. All the...
View Article#infallible
With the arrival of @Pontifex, Pope Benedict XVI has joined the ranks of the Twitterati. Benedict’s predecessor on the papal throne, John Paul II, introduced e-mail to the Vatican’s communications...
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Reading in the Waiting Room
“The Timbertoes,” from “Highlights” magazine My ophthalmologist’s office was crowded. The doctor was behind, there would be a real wait. The place was packed with people (including myself) in...
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Publishers in Transition (and the Readers Who Love Them)
This morning my Twitter feed led off with this message from RandomDigital, the electronic arm of the august publishing firm Random House: @RandomDigital: Please support media companies in transition by...
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The Mixed Blood Project
This will be my last post for Lingua Franca. It’s been a good experience but I need to put my shoulder to some other wheels. Last month, in Berkeley (at University Press Books), we launched the third...
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Biodestiny and All That Jazz
Hard-core discussions of gender have their own lexicon, as do hard-core discussions of anything. Like other vocabularies, this one has made its way into broader discourse as the relevant...
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Predicting Prudence From Tense Marking?
Neuhauser Steet, in Munich. Do Germans save more than English speakers because of grammar? Keith Chen, an economist at the Yale School of Management, recently gave a TED talk about his claim (in a...
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Txtng Rules
Two weeks ago I gave a talk to a group of University of Michigan at Ann Arbor undergraduates called “Txtng and the Future of English.” As a linguist who studies the history of the English language, I...
View ArticleSpurious Correlations Everywhere: the Tragedy of Big Data
I promised (last Thursday) to say a little more about Keith Chen’s claim that obligatory future-tense marking in your language makes you less prudent in safeguarding your health and wealth. Chen’s data...
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A Hell of a Note
Harold Ross No less than scratchy records and faded photographs, antique slang can powerfully and palpably evoke an era. Of course, the longer ago the era, the less intelligible the slang. Last week,...
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Rockin’ Robin
My mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody...
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The Cliché Expert Gets Fired Up Over March Madness
Mike Krzyzewski, coach at Duke, whose team generates more than a few well-worn descriptives (In his heyday, Mr. Arbuthnot, the Cliché Expert, regularly graced the pages of The New Yorker, offering his...
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