Take one part gothic thriller, two parts cozy mystery clichés, and three parts Agatha Christie, stir them all up and you get Carolyn Hart’s Death of the Party. It’s a serviceable combination of those components, but what stands out is… Read More ›
Odds are that you studied a European language back in high school — most likely Spanish or French, possibly German or Italian — and you quickly realized that the vowels in those languages are not pronounced as they are in… Read More ›
Statistically speaking, as a reader of this blog, you are most likely a native speaker of English, so surely you must understand written English better than a random South Korean teen. Right? Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. A recent… Read More ›
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University who is both a professional linguist and a popular linguist. In other words, he writes both for his colleagues and for the general public. He also podcasts for the latter… Read More ›
After getting haircuts at SuperCuts, Barbara and I walked to the storefront right next door to it and ate brunch at Milkweed. What excellent geography we have here in Dorchester! Barbara had the traditional homemade house-made corned beef hash, which… Read More ›
Trump claims that the USA has regained the respect of everyone across the globe, but the Marsh Family knows the truth:
Seventy years ago the great Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes penned this inscription in the front of my dad’s copy of Hughes’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. (Note that Hughes’s co-author, Milton Meltzer, added his own autograph… Read More ›
This book would have made an excellent New Yorker article. But a whole book? Not so much. All right, I suppose many a New Yorker article does feel like an entire book — but Enough is Enuf by Gabe Henry… Read More ›
So I keep seeing references to posts on Reddit…and I always ignore them. But then I said to myself, “Why not give Reddit a chance? What’s there to lose?” That led me to sign up for a few subreddits in… Read More ›
Yes, you read that correctly: the title really is Friends with Words, not the more familiar phrase Words with Friends. And even the correct phrase, Friends with Words, has at least two meanings (think about it). If you yourself are… Read More ›
In accordance with long-established tradition, Barbara and I went to Chau Chow yesterday for a delicious Christmas feast: beef noodle, Chinese broccoli, har gao, shumai, xiao long bao, shrimp paste in tofu skin, stuffed taro, and pan-fried noodles with jumbo… Read More ›
Recently I’ve been playing with Claude AI, so I asked it (him? are we personifying AI’s these days?) to predict how English will change over the next 600 years. (Why 600? Because Middle English was spoken about 600 years ago,… Read More ›
and whose videos nevertheless share one particular flaw. I’m talking about Julie Maksimova, better known as Julingo, and Dr. Taylor Jones, better known as Language Jones. You can see what they’ve both done there with their noms, but that has… Read More ›
What took me so long? Today I learned about a new-to-me linguistics blog and podcast called “A language I love is…” This blog has been around since June of 2020, and the podcast since 2023, so I certainly should have… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 