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Warren Buffett Is a Better Writer Than I Am. Damn It.
Warren Buffett Periodically, I experience a sinking sensation roughly verbalized as, “The person who wrote what I’m reading isn’t a writer by trade, but does what I do better than I do. Damn his eyes.”...
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Don’t Thank Me?
Satire can be so subtle. That’s what I thought at first when I read Nick Bilton’s column on digital etiquette in The New York Times. When Mr. Bilton wrote, “Some people are so rude. Really, who sends...
View ArticleFair Comment and Privileged Occasions
I’ve been interested in the linguistic aspects of defamation law for many years. Delving into the history of libel and slander uncovers all sorts of strange facts. Some are discussed in Chapters 12 and...
View ArticleGuys and … ?
When does a girl become a woman in the English language? If you spend a lot of time with college students, which I happen to do, you see them trying to navigate this question, trying to figure out what...
View ArticleMr. X
The current issue of The New Yorker contains a very long article by Marc Fisher entitled “The Master.” It is a remarkable, scrupulous, and devastating account of many reprehensible actions of Robert...
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Signs of the Times
Ad from ‘The New Yorker,’ June 6, 1942 The other day, I got a message on Twitter from the writer Ruth Franklin: “Re. New Yorker book, question for you. Do you have a sense of when hotels stopped...
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Responding First
Once again, with the marathon bombings in Boston, we heard a term that didn’t exist when I was growing up: first responder. The blogosphere hums with disdain for coinages of the last 50 years, so I’d...
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Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore
In the undergraduate history of English course I am teaching this term, I request/require that the students teach me two new slang words every day before I begin class. I learn some great words this...
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The Comic Stylings of POTUS
Obama at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “But I kid Mitch McConnell. … “ At 10:14 PM on April 27, Barack Obama took the podium at the Washington Hilton to the tune of “All I do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled....
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R.I.P. LOL
We may be seeing the death spasms of lol, and few will mourn its passing. Emerging a couple of decades ago as an initialism for laugh[ing] out loud, it suffered misuse through most of its brief life by...
View ArticleWhy Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?
Try typing this, or any question with roughly the same meaning, into the Google search box: Which UK papers are not part of the Murdoch empire? Your results (and you could get identical ones by typing...
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Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic
I promised last week that I would discuss three developments that turned almost-useless language-connected technological capabilities into something seriously useful. The one I want to introduce first...
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Dueling Titles
Hundreds of readers opened their New York Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April . . . no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the...
View ArticleSpeech Recognition vs. Language Processing
I have stressed that we are still waiting for natural language processing (NLP). One thing that might lead you to believe otherwise is that some companies run systems that enable you to hold a...
View ArticleMachine Translation Without the Translation
I have been ruminating this month on why natural language processing (NLP) still hasn’t arrived, and I have pointed to three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging its development. First,...
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When Fizzling Was Taboo
Reviving obsolete meanings of words is largely a futile business, but with the verb fizzle, it just might be worth the effort. At least it’s worth a chuckle. My own discovery of this word’s history...
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Dying Is Easy
Tobias Fünke (David Cross) on “Arrested Development”: “This is ripe for parody. This is ripe!” Last week I wrote a piece for Slate about how the TV comedy Arrested Development–canceled by Fox in 2006,...
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Sight for Sore Eyes
When I stopped by a friend’s office the other day, he said, “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” I responded, “I trust you mean that in the positive sense!” And he looked at me like I was from...
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In Polite Defense of ‘No Problem’
In last Sunday’s “Social Q’s” column in The New York Times, Jennifer from Waccabuc, N.Y., described a man correcting her son for not saying “you’re welcome” after the man had thanked him for holding a...
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‘The New Yorker,’ on Index Cards
If you go to The New Yorker‘s Web site, find an article or story you’re interested in, and click on it, you will be presented with a page the top of which looks something like this: If you are a...
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