So at work I've been updating what we call the "bad word filter". This is a bunch of regexps that we use to detect whether a document has questionable content or not. In other words, whether it's a porn site or a link to one. Did you know that there is a difference in connotation between the words buttman and assman? They both have the same * ( Read more... )

I'mm working on job applications tonight. In my research statement I just misspelled the word "grammar" as "grammer". Ok, see, I am a linguist. I have been studying linguistics for the past twelve years. I have had plenty of practice during that time typing the word "grammar" correctly. That is not a word I should be misspelling at all at this ( Read more... )

"So who are the sucka MCs that Chomsky is layin' it down for in this section?"

(Answer: behaviorists.)

My friend Adam, who just signed up for an lj account (dheghom) after months of needling him into getting a blog, used the phrase "the distinctive, ostensibly circumflex-like diacritic" in his first post. This is a typically Adam-sounding thing for him to say. In fact, it's completely unattested in Google ( Read more... )

B.: You know, I've always thought that the glottis resembles a vagina.
Me: ...
Me: I've never seen it that way before.
B.: Really? You don't think they look similar?
Me: ...
Me: Thanks for putting that image in my head.

Everything we previously knew about the Indo-European language family is wrong. Modern English is in fact the ancestor of all other languages spoken in Western Europe:


( Read more... )

Someone signed the name "CHUCK FOMSKY" in red sharpie in the 1st floor men's room in Morrill (the building with the linguistics department, among others).

Yeah, that's right. CHUCK FOMSKY.

Also, the exhortation dating from the 2004 election to "NUKE FRANCE" has now been changed to "NUKE BUSH'S RANCH".

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

M: So what's your dissertation topic again?
Me: Japanese ::mumble mumble::
M: Japanese word-order morphology? What?
Me: Japanese loanword ::mumble::
M: Japanese loanword mythology?
Me: Japanese loanword phonology.
M: ... Oh.

...the assumed ultimate unaccountability of human behaviour tends to lend itself as a good excuse to practise linguistics as the art of thinking up elegant and aesthetically pleasing just-so stories.

-Nikolaus Ritt, "Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution", p. 114 (fn. 8)

This morning in the shower I saw two spiders fighting with each other. One of them moved in and stung the other one several times on the abdomen, then its legs all collapsed in on the victim and the two spiders became this wriggling ball of spider parts for a while before the loser managed to disengage and run away. It was....interesting ( Read more... )