If you have strong concerns about English usage, science reporting, language analysis, lexicography, or linguistic atrocities of any kind, you should use Language Log. It is well known for its delayed release. For best results daily use is recommended. Although...

Step 1: A language maven M contrasts two (roughly) equivalent variants X and Y, labeling them standard and non-standard respectively (or, more starkly, "correct" and "incorrect") and proscribing Y.  This is the labeling phase. Step 2: M attempts to...

Grant Barrett is now doing a weekly language column for the Malaysia Star, and this week he talks about saying things the wrong way on purpose — intentional errors like the Internets and coinkydink. The column got picked up by...

Many -- indeed, most -- linguistic expressions have more than one meaning.  An apparently trivial observation, but one that leads to all sorts of puzzles in linguistic analysis and theorizing.  The central question is how meanings are associated with...

The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding (Right-Node Raising division) goes to Andrew Ilachinsky, author of "Exploring self-organized emergence in an agent-based synthetic warfare lab", Kybernetes, 32(1/2): 38-76, 2003: 4.84 Universal grammar of combat. Finally, what lies at the heart...

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With dreary inevitability, Al Gore dusted off his favorite language-related trope for his speech accepting the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (text, video): In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, "crisis" is written with two symbols, the first...

A friend of mine, whom I cannot name, at an undisclosed location in Iran which will have to remain undisclosed, has risked telling me this in a private (let us hope) email message: I just spent a good hour going...

According to David Biello, "Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution", Scientific American, 12/10/2007: Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to...

A fascinating article on the life of Ferdinand de Saussure, a central figure in the emergence of modern linguistics, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement a few weeks ago, and Language Log is a bit late in providing a pointer...