This is a little advance warning, to long-time readers of the Phrontistery, that I will no longer be featuring linguistic content from my Livejournal page on the homepage of the site.   In other words, if you're reading this from the Phrontistery homepage, or if you use an RSS feed to read Phrontistery-related material, very soon, you won't be able ( Read more... )

A correspondent to the Phrontistery yesterday posed a very interesting riddle:

I was in a pub the other day and saw a barometer on the wall. It was old and has the word pausodonoptic on it. I had never heard of this before and was curious so I did a bit of searching online. I didn't really find any definition of the word anywhere. I was ( Read more... )

Once again, the students in my senior / graduate linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written abstracts of their research papers, which I have now posted on the course blog of the same name.    As always, I am casting a wide net, looking for comments from anyone interested in these subjects.     If you have a few spare ( Read more... )

I'm looking at the official description of the boundary of my provincial riding (electoral district) just now, where I learn that it is "that part of the City of Windsor lying westerly and southerly of a line described as follows: commencing at the intersection of the international boundary between Canada and the United States of America with the ( Read more... )

An astute Phrontistery reader inquires:

I was wondering if you could help me with a word issue.  I was just reading some stuff on the Internet today and came across pleonasm.  Later on in the article, they used the term "pleonastic".  A look up one m-w.com confirmed that this was a correctly derived form of the word "pleonasm".  Seconds before ( Read more... )

So apparently Arthur has overcome his longstanding hatred of the French language. For those of you who don't know, he was in a French-only daycare for a year in 2007-08 and picked up nothing, although he did learn to count to four in Spanish from Handy Manny. So today, after finishing playing with his new Nintendo 3DS (for which many thanks go out ( Read more... )

As always, the students in my upper-level / graduate course, Language and Societies, are posting abstracts of their research papers over at the course blog. I'm trying to get them to think about how they present their research in a public forum and to encourage discussion. Several students are considering submitting their work to conferences and ( Read more... )

So, I've done the ridiculous and started another blog. No, I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not eliminating Glossographia either (although I have been shamefully remiss in updating it). The Alien Commuter will consist of a series of essays, remarks and ramblings on the theme of the city of Windsor-Detroit and life as a transnational commuter and ( Read more... )

Arthur has coined a new term, fiendrel, a portmanteau word of fiend and scoundrel, used generally to describe enemies in video games. It appears, from some Google searching, to be a complete innovation on his part, except for one person who gave the name to their WoW character. Once or twice he said 'foundrel', but I think he's gotten over it ( Read more... )

This sentence makes my head hurt, and reminds me that I lack the intestinal fortitude to be a syntactician ( Read more... )