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Competence, Performance, and Climate
Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance has been controversial in linguistics and psycholinguistics for 50 years. The proponents of generative grammar presuppose it and rely on...
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The End of Irony. Or Not.
David Letterman played it straight after 9/11: “New York is the greatest city in the world.” “What’s all this irony and pity?” “What? Don’t you know about Irony and Pity?” “No. Who got it up?”...
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Take My Metadata
We are all going to have to get used to the word metadata. Explaining what it means in simple terms is quite tricky, for it is a genuinely abstract concept. (And let me warn the purists up front that...
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Love, Blog Me Do. (You Know I Blog You.)
My husband teases me for skipping past much of the bulk of newspaper editorials to get to the comments. He’s a social scientist, interested in government policies and the social order; I’m a fiction...
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Wanted: Grown-Up Bedtime Stories
Preparing for my vacation next week, I posted a query on Facebook, which read in part: “Looking for suggestions for a couple of novels to really get into on vacation. Am not looking for tales of...
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Existential Questions
Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. of the U.S. Marine Corps Testifying before a Senate Committee last week, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., President Obama’s nominee to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “If...
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The Fringe Is Coming to Town
I love this time of year in Edinburgh. The weather, of course, remains its usual disgraceful self: high winds with on-and-off rain the past few days. The gap between the David Hume Tower and the...
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‘Academic Interest’
Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler go for a walk. In a video that is available online, you can watch Judith Butler, philosopher and winner of a bad writing award, speaking to a crowd at Occupy Wall...
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Hyphenation, Carbonation, and X-Rays
The catcher and sage Yogi Berra was allegedly once asked if the name of the bottled chocolate beverage he endorsed was hyphenated. “No ma’am,” he is said to have replied. “It’s not even carbonated.”...
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On @Tejucole and #Prompts
Teju ColePhoto credit: Retha Ferguson The use of the word prompt to mean incitement or cue has probably been around for 500 years or so, but its use in a narrower sense, as an instruction or directions...
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Diagramming Trump
According to “steveknows,” commenting on the Slate article “Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!” I have been punked. I don’t care. Gertrude Stein said there was nothing more exciting than...
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The Gray Lady Gets Jiggy
Jon Stewart: “If you smell something, say something” August 8 was a momentous day, at least in my geeky world. That was because The New York Times decided “bullshit” was Fit To Print. Twice before in...
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Best Linguistic Jokes of the 2015 Fringe
Jo Brand delivered Geoff Pullum’s No. 4 August is gone, and with it the Edinburgh Festival and its fabulous Fringe. The grand orchestral concert with fireworks over the castle was on Monday night, the...
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Love Game
Once a year, Flushing Meadows in New York turns into a 22-ring circus of tennis, and people start asking me, as a lifelong tennis player, what all those words mean. I wasn’t going to write about tennis...
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Sex and Verbs and Rock ’n’ Roll
Last week I promised to explain why I was recently browsing in a little German grammar book I have owned since 1963. Here’s the straight truth. I have been invited to lecture on data and theory next...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, Lingua Franca!
Slightly more than four years and a thousand posts ago, at the behest of the editor Heidi Landecker at The Chronicle of Higher Education, this Lingua Franca blog came into being. Since that time, day...
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German for Beginners
Refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, arrive in Bavaria. (Photo by Falk Heller/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) MUNICH — Spende, reads the sign leaning against a tent outside Munich’s main train station....
View ArticleSnapping Fingers
I have recently encountered an endearing trend among high-school and college students, informally as well as in classrooms and in larger gatherings: collective finger-snapping. Once, in the middle of a...
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American Stars and Hearts
(image from theverge.com) If Twitter users want to respond to a tweet, they have three options: reply to it, retweet it, or mark it with a symbol of approval. Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has...
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A Postcard From Bilbao
Guggenheim Musem Bilbao, Louise Bourgeois sculpture Maman in foreground. [[Photo by Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz, Wikimedia Commons]]Bilbao, Spain People whose experience of Spain goes back many...
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