For nearly a century, linguists have been struggling to unseat the accumulated dogma that “masquerades as common sense,” as the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield put it in 1933. That’s the challenge that faces every developing science, but linguistics seems to have had a harder time than most. People who readily accept the principles of modern economics, psychology and biology still cling to notions about language that are as antiquated as a belief in physiocracy or leeching.
or, Why Laurie Anderson is less Avant-Garde than DJ Kool Herc. A rant with videos.
Turns of phrase like “irregardless,” “prolly,” and “imma” can be cringeworthy, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t words.
pesamenteiroWhat we have here is one of the great comeback stories in the history of competitive punctuation.
gheegle
The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.
waldeinsamkeit
The feeling of being alone in the woods.
The discovery of a previously unknown language in the foothills of the Himalayas bucks a trend of extinction and decline, says Laura Spinney
Dord is a notable error in lexicography, an accidental creation in the second (1934) edition of its New International Dictionary, in which the term is defined as “density”. Webster’s chemistry editor, sent in a slip reading “D or d, cont./density.” This was intended to add “density” to the existing list of words that the letter “D” can abbreviate. The slip somehow went astray, and the phrase “D or d” was misinterpreted as a single, run-together word: Dord.
ilunga
l’esprit d’escalier