The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines? HBO just [greenlight] Season 2. Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works. The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT. If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for t ..read more

A round-up of linguistic items – essays, news, blog posts, papers, and podcasts on language – for your enjoyment and diversion: Learning Na’vi. On plurals of hapax. Birds in English place names. A selection of Irish-language slang. Unpacking the Madeline Kripke Collection. Neutralizing the accents of call centre workers. The unexpected joys of Denglisch and Berlinglish. History of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (podcast, 30 min.). The benefits for children of reading for pleasure. The Hand of Irulegi and the origins of Basque. Linguistic behaviour at the end of life. You are not a (stochastic) par ..read more

At Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, I have a new post up about the idiom swear like a [X]. After seeing the phrase swear like a trooper (maybe in Beryl Bainbridge’s A Quiet Life), I got to wondering how it arose; a few hours later I had found more [X]s than I’d ever imagined existed. Some are common, others less so but familiar, and there are many, many obscure variants, plays on the clichés, and predictable/peculiar one-offs. And that’s before we even look at equivalent expressions in other languages, which is where the starling in the post title comes in (Czech, as it happens ..read more

How slang catches on, survives, and fades:   The schwa is never stressed? Ridiculous, says Geoff Lindsey:   What America got wrong about Ebonics:   How dialect coaches put the accent on performances:   The hidden rules of conversation: a primer on Grice’s maxims:   What motivates polyglots to learn new languages:   For more like this, see ‘Seven videos about language’ from last year, ‘Six videos about language’ from further back, or browse the video tag in the Sentence first archive ..read more

Links, links, dozens of links! About language, linguistics, literature, and wordy stuff. Most are for reading, some () for listening. Literature clock. How we read emoji. The language of the hand. Linguistic relativity: a primer. ‘Saying the quiet part out loud’. Is AI really mastering language? Toward a theory of the New Weird. The many functions of pointing . People still prefer to read physical books. The changing politics of the Russian language. Bat singing, babbling, and other vocalizations (). Collecting Madeline Kripke’s dictionaries and the M-W Archive. The origins of punching up and ..read more

Language change is something I watch closely, both as a copy-editor and as someone broadly interested in how we communicate. I read usage dictionaries for fun; I also read a lot of fiction, and sometimes, as a treat, it throws up explicit commentary on shifts or variation in usage.* This happened most recently in Consumed (Scribner, 2014) by David Cronenberg (whose thoughts on language invention I covered earlier this year). Nathan, a young photojournalist, is visiting Roiphe, an elderly doctor, who calls Nathan ‘son’ just before the passage below, emphasizing the generational gap. They’re sit ..read more

On a recent rewatch of the 1979 film The Warriors, I noticed an unusual pronoun spoken by Cleon, played by Dorsey Wright:* Ourself, once in regular use, is now scarce outside of certain dialects, and many (maybe most) people would question its validity. I’ve seen it followed by a cautious editorial [sic] even in linguistic contexts. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), describing it as the reflexive form of singular we – ‘an honorific pronoun used by monarchs, popes, and the like’ – says it is ‘hardly current’ in present-day English. But that’s not the whole story, and it bel ..read more

Early in the pandemic, I used Zoom and other video-chat platforms like never before. For me it was mostly social, not work-related: a way to see and stay in touch with family and friends when I wasn’t meeting them in person. I soon noticed ways the technology compromised communication. Take back-channelling. This is when we say things like mm, yeah, and whoa to convey, minimally, that we’re listening, that we agree, that the speaker should continue their conversational turn, and so on. Back-channelling didn’t work well in some apps, because the timing was slightly out of sync or because the so ..read more

It’s a truism that language is integral to identity. So when our relationship with it changes, complications quickly accrue: Do we become someone different in another tongue? Is that all down to culture and context, or is there something inherent in a language that affects who we feel ourselves to be? And what happens when we start our lives speaking one language but then switch to another? These are among the questions explored, with heart and rigour, in Julie Sedivy’s new book, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (available October 2021 from Harvard University Press, wh ..read more

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech. I mean, sure, I can say ‘makes the sense ambiguous’. But there’s no reason not to have a one-word verb. After all, we have its antonym, disambiguate: to make something unambiguous. More on that later. Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Withou ..read more