A couple of weeks ago, Helsinki’s daily paper Helsingin Sanomat published an article called “Lauri Lassila huomasi, että osa hänen ystävistään ei osaa puhua enää suomea, vaikka haluaisikin” (Lauri Lassila noticed that his friends can’t speak Finnish anymore, even though they want to). It might seem like a harmless article about the youths. But as usual with this kind of article, there are some malicious messages in it. Let’s take a look at why this article should never have been written.
Continue reading “Helsinki’s largest paper believes in language nonsense”Positive “anymore”
I recently heard from an old friend who had stumbled upon my website. He said he was shocked when he read this line from my bio:
My family says that anymore at the end of the last sentence sounds wrong, but it’s all good.
This line piqued his interest because he also puts anymore at the ends of sentences, but his wife doesn’t – even though she grew up somewhat close to where he did. And she has commented about how his family does it as well. My website made him think that maybe this wasn’t something that only his family said. And indeed he’s right! It’s called “positive anymore” and there are millions of English speakers that say this. But there are also many millions more who do not, so they may notice it when they hear someone say it.
There’s a Wikipedia page on the topic – which doesn’t do a great job explaining things, so let’s try to do better.
Continue reading “Positive “anymore””More misidentified passives
But this time it’s… on purpose? What?!
Yesterday, Benji Smith became the main character on Writer Twitter. It turns out that Mr. Smith has created a database of novels that he obtained through probably illegal means. Smith used this database in his Prosecraft project, which published statistics about each novel, such as its word count, the number of adverbs in each, and something called the “vividness” of the writing style (I’m not really sure what that means and Smith doesn’t provide a good definition). He was also using this database to promote his word processor program Shaxpir 4, which is why he’s almost certainly breaking the law.
But one of the other things that he claims to analyze is how many passive verbs are in the novels. And Smith has a very interesting (aka “bad”) definition of “passive voice”.
Continue reading “More misidentified passives”George Packer and the Atlantic’s sad defense of inequity
Content warning: This post is about harmful language and it contains words that are used to dehumanize people. Please take caution.
In April 2023, the Atlantic published a 2,500-word opinion piece complaining about language equity style guides. The attack on these guides is misleading, wrong, and harmful. It continually misrepresents the style guides. It shows a misunderstanding of the content and the point of them. It refuses to accept others and expresses contempt for anything that doesn’t fit the author’s narrow and outdated idea of language. And it gives fuel to the fascists in their culture war.
Continue reading “George Packer and the Atlantic’s sad defense of inequity”Dr. Andrew Thomas tries to mansplain mansplaining
Is this dude about to mansplain mansplaining? Hoo boy. Here we go.
This is going to be a long post. I’ll go through each part of the article with my usual irreverence, but don’t be fooled. Thomas’s ideas about language are a real danger to women. So I’ll comment seriously on that as well. Let’s get to it.
tl;dr – Andrew Thomas is incredibly wrong about mansplaining. He cites no sources to back up his claim that men and women have different communication styles, except for one limited study from 40 years ago. Modern linguistic research disproves Thomas’s ideas, and in fact his ideas are about 50 years out of date. Mansplaining is one part of systematic discrimination that women face. Thomas tries to water down the meaning of mansplaining. Thomas’s ideas are dangerous because they will be used to silence and exclude women in society.
Continue reading “Dr. Andrew Thomas tries to mansplain mansplaining”Janne Saarikivi’s Fascism Lite, or how to fearmonger with statistics
On May 15, Janne Saarikivi published a turd of an opinion column in YLE (Finland’s national broadcasting company). The article is a prime example of nationalistic fearmongering. It has the appearance of being well-thought out and reasoned, like the contemplations of a reflective scholar, but a peek under the hood shows that it’s just repackaged right-wing ideas. The problem is that Saarikivi’s article is likely to convince readers who do not have any knowledge about his topics. And that’s a lot of people. So strap on your Nokia boots and let’s wade through this bullshit swamp.
Continue reading “Janne Saarikivi’s Fascism Lite, or how to fearmonger with statistics”Grambank linguistic database
There’s a new linguistic database in town! [Duffman voice: Oooooh, yeah!]
It’s called Grambank and according to its website it was “designed to be used to investigate the global distribution of features, language universals, functional dependencies, language prehistory and interactions between language, cognition, culture and environment.” Sounds great!
I haven’t had too much time to check it out yet, but the interface is similar to WALS, so if you’re familiar with that, you should be able to jump right in. And Grambank is open-access so you can indeed jump right in!
Grambank has 2,467 languages (from 215 different families) and it has info on 195 linguistic features. You can read more about it on its website here: https://grambank.clld.org/
There is one very important finding already out of the research: language diversity in the world is at great risk. Hedvig Skirgård and Simon Greenhill, two of the researchers that created Grambank, have an article in the Conversation in which they warn:
some regions of the world such as South America and Australia are expected to lose all of their indigenous linguistic diversity, because all of the indigenous languages there are threatened
This is worrying. Language is closely connected to people’s lives and so language loss means a loss in the health and well-being of people.
Skirgård and Greenhill give more details on the situation in their piece, including a call to action:
Without sustained support for language revitalisation, many people will be harmed and our shared linguistic window into human history, cognition and culture will become seriously fragmented.
There are projects dedicated to language protection and revitalization. You don’t have to be a linguist to join one of these organizations and help out. Wikipedia has a list of some of these groups, but you could also check with your local authorities.
Some of Noah Webster’s spelling changes haven’t happened yet!
If you learn about attempts at spelling reform in English, you’re bound to come across Noah Webster’s suggestions. Webster is considered the grandfather of American English since he had such a profound influence on it in the early days. His Blue-backed speller (basically a school grammar book) went through 385 editions and sold 60 million copies. Holy cow! And his dictionary? Well, that old thing is still being updated and it still has his name on it.
Some of Webster’s spelling reforms stuck. He’s the reason US English doesn’t spell honor, color or neighbor with a u. But others not so much. He suggested spelling women as wimmin. I’m sure he meant well, but try saying that out loud and not sounding like a person who definitely doesn’t like women. He suggested korus for chorus and dawter for daughter. You can see the idea behind these suggestions – they simplify the relationship between sound and spelling. The only reason they look wrong or strange to us is because they didn’t catch on. We learned that daughter was spelled with “augh” instead of “aw” and so everything else looks rong (or “wrong”).
And that brings us to another one of Webster’s suggestions that didn’t catch on… or didn’t catch on yet! In a similar fashion to korus and dawter and honor and color, Webster suggested that we spell machine as masheen. Looks fine to me! But of course, we all know that no one spells it that way. And that’s because we’re still in the first century of the millennium. We’re going to have to wait another 500 years for the spelling of machine to change to masheen.
Because that’s exactly how it’s spelled in the movie Idiocracy. (Spoiler alert for a movie that came out over 15 years ago.) The plot takes place in the year 2505. At the end of the movie, the protagonist is taken to a theme park ride called the “Time Masheen”:
I’m sure the director Mike Judge was having fun here – or maybe he’s a lexicography buff and he was tipping his hat to ol’ Noah. I know that this spelling of masheen is supposed to show how stupid people have become in the future, but spelling reform is actually a good idea. Some argue that spelling reform will have to happen sooner or later in English, especially as we get further away from the current spelling of words due to sound shifts, so why not now? And there’s the fact that our antiquated spelling system makes learning unnecessarily difficult. But there are other problems associated with spelling reform, such as choosing which variety of English to base the spelling on when there are so many different varieties. Food for thought.
Check out some more of Webster’s suggestions in an article by Arika Okrent for The Week. Merriam-Webster has a post about other spelling reforms that never caught on (including masheen). And the podcast Word Matters, which is hosted by editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, has an episode where they discuss the history of Noah Webster’s monumental work on his dictionary. In that episode they talk about exactly why masheen never caught on – hint: Noah was bamboozled by his editors!
How NOT to talk about language change
A New York Times article from 1977 article rolled across my screen recently (courtesy of Mark Harris). It concerns language change and boy is it a doozy. The article asked members of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel to give their comments on some recent developments in English. Let’s take a look.
Continue reading “How NOT to talk about language change”The meaning of “Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more video games or games, unlimited games, but no more games?”
I was recently asked about the meaning of the phrase
Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more video games or games, unlimited games, but no more games?
On first glance, this phrase may not seem to work (and it kind of doesn’t – more on that below), but it gets used around the internet and people understand it. So that means it does work. What gives?
Continue reading “The meaning of “Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more video games or games, unlimited games, but no more games?””