Metrosexual. The Americans blame French cissies and Brit hacks, but the honours go to Galician AZ Alkmaar footballer, José Fortes Rodriguez: Some women just don’t get it. They’re not used to being turned down. They say: Go on, you want me don’t you! I say: Am I talking Chinese? I don’t find you attractive. And…
I don’t think that John McWhorter’s “YO!” has really “floated to the ends of sentences and lost its shouting intonation, and … become what linguists would call a pragmatic marker.” It’s just like football: there are always a few pragmatic markers hanging around on the margins of matches, and then there are Dutch defenders who…
Ah, how we all laughed at mad old Arnie! Mr Schoenberg, who was born on the 13th and feared the number all his life (Twelve tones? That’ll do nicely…), of course died on the 13th, just when he thought his illness had passed. And now the epidemiologists (c/o Bristol-Myers Squibb (Taiwan) Ltd) seem to be…
As the barking of the mad dogs of Mechelen recedes, Hispanic PR Newswire mutters in our ear that its market is suffering from a severe case of the proverbs: Often, excuses come disguised as popular wisdom… Unfortunately, the sayings nearest and dearest to us, those passed on through generations, have also culturally conditioned us to…
If you search Google for “Flurble gronk bloopit, bnip Frundletrune” it asks – quite fairly in my opinion – whether you meant “Fluble gronk bloopit, bnip Frundletrune“. Let’s see what kind of ads that generates. Via Syntactic Saccharose.
Mark Liberman has a devastating post that goes way beyond the other day’s rather unconcluded up business. What I wonder, though, and briefly so, is why “to * up” ghits about so much more than “to * down“, to say nothing of that unloved beast, “to * it all around”. Dinner is emerging from the…
The noble Iggy notes that Korean “parents are turning to surgery to sort out misplaced l and r sounds.” Apparently The procedure, which takes twenty to thirty minutes under local anesthetic, involves snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler. This is an interesting idea. For example, are there…
Funny old world: just when I announce that this blog will henceforth be devoted to politics (ie money, sex, violence and food), Language Log goes and blogrolls me. Cool, cool, incredibly cool, but I know a secret agenda even when I’m on the drugs. What this is really about is one Mr Liberman@LL kicking his…
More from Eurweb: The last time we saw Dre he was disheveled, by pimp standards, and wearing a stocking cap in a concrete cell somewhere in Nevada. Now he’s out like stout. How’d that happen? Dre explains on. – Gorgeous Dre, you are hereby accused of profiting from the immoral earnings of others.– I innocent,…