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‘Sudden Death’ at El Mundial
I love the expression “sudden death.” It refers to a FIFA tie-breaking rule last used in 2002, when South Korea and Japan hosted the World Cup, but most of matches in this year’s El Mundial, as the...
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Mandarin Myths
Seenox (it bills itself as “the ultimate time waster website,” so you have been warned) offers yet another compilation of signs in China with hilariously botched English translations. An obscene...
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The Languages of the World Cup
James Rodriguez’s “poem of a goal” against Uruguay. The English commentator likened it to the cream atop strawberries on a summer night. Borges, in an interview, once said that he didn’t like soccer....
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Linguists sometimes get discouraged about the rampant prescriptivism in public discussions of language. This past week was no exception, as many of us watched with some dismay as both friends and...
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Speaking Out Against Hate Speech (or Not)
The dinner-table conversation touched for a few moments on Usain Bolt, earth’s fastest biped, who’s in Scotland to ensure a win for Jamaica in the men’s sprint relay at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in...
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The Giants Won the Pennant
On Thursday, in the National League Championship Series game between San Francisco Giants and the St. Lous Cardinals, Giants outfiender Travis Ishikawa came to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning....
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Stuff Like That There
After Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants won the World Series Most Valuable Player award, Chevrolet called on a local regional manager to present Bumgarner with the keys to the truck that...
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Idiom Strong
Residents of Barrett, Pennsylvania, sold t-shirts to help local police defray costs associated with a recent manhunt. Back in September, Barrett Township, in Pennsylvania, was the center of a manhunt...
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The List Lilt
Stephen Potter I told you about vocal fry. And you know all about uptalk? The inflection that was first discussed by Robin Lakoff in 1976, that was given its name by James Gorman in a 1993 New York...
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People Who Died
Elaine May and Mike Nichols “Those are people who died, died Those are people who died, died Those are people who died, died Those are people who died, died They were all my friends, and they died.”...
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New Grub Street
George Gissing It seemed like a good idea at the time. The new paradigm for creative folk, that is. Dispense with jobs, with their soul-deadening cubicles and time clocks (metaphorical or literal) and...
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Can I Get a Better Way to Order Food?
Marvin Gaye A couple of years ago, the BBC published an essay on that staple of British journalism, the terribleness of Americanisms polluting the mother tongue. The Beeb invited readers to send in...
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Saving El Gordo
(Credit: We Love Philosophy) A few years ago, a Spanish psychologist and his team of researchers asked about 700 students to decide whether they would kill one person to save five. It was a version of...
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Me and Chris Jones, We Got a Thing Goin’ On
Gender neutrality, however loudly announced in official pronouncements or in the news, creeps into our own set of norms on little cat feet. In my case, I realized it had made another inroad when I was...
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Nice Going, Genius
Scalia: Sarcastic In the slim annals of professorial humor, one of the cherished entries concerns an anthropological linguistics conference where the speaker declaims, “In languages all over the globe,...
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Baaack to the Future
I picked up The Philadelphia Inquirer last week and read an article by Jeremy Roebuck about how a judicial ruling had revived the onetime local news anchor Alycia Lane’s long-dormant lawsuit against...
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Free Speech, the Rough and the Smooth
Free speech attacked yet again. Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, angered somehow by the privilege of growing up in peaceful Denmark rather than war-ravaged Palestine, sprayed bullets from an M-95 at...
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Whose Monday? Your Monday!
A concerned Lingua Franca reader writes: Perhaps it is just here in Gainesville, but I find that the radio reporters, especially those reporting weather, use the possessive pronoun when referring to...
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Diary of a Visiting Speaker
The audience at a talk sees the visiting speaker ushered into the room to check the connection dongle for the projector and greet a few faculty acquaintances in the front row. A brief introduction, a...
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‘A Piece of Cake’
It started with an email from my eclectic friend Wes Davis. He said he’d been reading Tinkerbelle, by, he told me, “Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who, in 1965, took a leave...
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