Language

• Hypertrophic Designations of Past Time: Avoidance of Placeless Existence?
• Form Follows Function (1): Stress
• Going to Rack and Ruin in the ‘Stans
• Form Follows Function (2): Vowel Alternation
• Teutonisms as Barbarisms
• Form as Part of Content (ad Antimetabole et al.)
• Explaining ‘advocate for’
• Of Proofs in Puddings and Roosters in Cabbage Soup
• The “Pin/Pen Merger”: An Example of Neutralization
• It’s Chinese to Me
• Pleonastically Extruded Adjectives
• Fatuous Bookishness (“That said,” etc.)
• Imperfect Learning
• Catachresis
• In a Shambles
• The (We)evil of Banality
• Fatuity and the Phatic
• Backing into the Past
• Pleonasm and Other Linguistic Hypertrophies
• Molière Redivivus
• Issues ≠ Problems
• Poetry––Not!
• ‘Head for’ vs. ‘Head to’
• Lenition, Not Voicing
• Failures of Thought
• Superfluous Syndeton
• Syntactic Idioms and Imperfect Learning
• At the End of the Day
• Rhymes with Pomeranian
• Verbal Proprioception
• Discontinuous Lexica
• Semantic Contamination
• Pronominal Prosopopoeia
• Ten Thousand Untruths
• Absolutely the All-Purpose Emphatic
• Triumph of the Ungrammatical
• The Last Straw
• Truncated Postpositions
• Girlized Intonation
• Linguistic Solipsism
• Infantilization of Lexis
• Bad Guys
• The Ideology of Vowel Reduction
• The Vocabulary of Self-Delusion
• Just Plain Folks
• Horror Silentii
• Adjectival Stress on the Wrong Sylláble
• Sound over Sense and the Iconic Impulse
• Sprig of Palestine
• Obama and Bush: A Shared Departure from the Linguistic Norm
• Continuity, Markedness, and the Jakobsonian Mode
• The Reality Is
• Passage Out of Passivity
• Ingratiation by Englessness
• Yiddishized Enumerative Intonation
• Leveling Out the Ablaut Pattern in Strong Verbs
• The Semiosis of Grammatical Error
• Fear of the Objective Case
• Basically the Attenuation of Assertory Force
• Backformation of Compound Verbs
• Sosal Sicurity (alias Social Security)
• If You Like
• Tinkering with Idioms through Contamination
• The Genius of the Mot Juste
• Variation in the Stress of Quadrisyllables
• The Pronunciation of Beijing
• “My Language Is the Sum Total of Myself.” (C. S. Peirce)
• Derived Compound Adjectives: gesunkenes Kulturgut?
• Discourse-Introductory so in Geek
• Morphophonemics of Nominal Derivation: British vs. American English
• *Magnimonious Poster Childs
• Grates otiosae sunt odiosae
• Anglo-Saxon vs. Latinate: The Semantics of Verbal Inanition
• A Stress Shift in a *Triblet of Trisyllables
• The Poetic Frisson of Archaism
• Latter-Day Homage to Pushkin: A Linguistic Exemplum
• The Jazzification of Musical Terminology
• Let Me Be Clear
• Japanese Prosody and Its Distortion in English
• Paralinguistic (Mis)behavior
• Aphaeresis Engulfs Tsunami
• Ignorance and the Insistence of the Letter
• Good Work ≠ Good Job
• Stammering as a Cultural Datum
• Addiction to “Air Quotes”
• DO, v., trans.
• Iconism and Learnèd Plurals
• Memoirs (plurale tantum)
• “Was unterscheidet Götter von Menschen?”
• Idiosyncratic Pronunciations: Tone-Deafness?
• Fragments of a Stylistic Auto-Commentary
• Homo figurans, not sapiens
• Clichés: Corpses from the Necropolis of Dead Metaphors
• Pauses between Words
• Stylistics of the Alveolar Flap
• What’s in a Name?
• The Connotative Content of Regional Accents
• Epiphenomena of Language Use (Nonce Forms)
• Repetition
• Paroemics: The Linguistic Ecology of the Proverb
• Professional Argots
• Error, A Natural History
• The Fading of Oral Tradition
• The Pentagon in Maryland (Sandhi and Prosody)
• Diachrony in Synchrony: Archaisms
• Friends in France (A Vowel Merger)
• O tempora, o mores! (Isoglosses)
• Lambasting the Oblivion of Constituent Structure
• Heterolingual Interpolations (Latin Phrases)
• “You’re Correct:”Hyperurbanism as Hypertrophy
• The Temperature in February (Dejotation)
• Déjà vu––Not!
• The Hidden Homophony in ‘Icon(ic)’
• “I Could Care Less:” A Conundrum Answered
• An Embarrassment of Onomastic Riches
• Incorrect Rection
• Goslings in Oslo (Medial s before Liquids)
• Paronomastic Interference in Language Change
• No(t a) Problem
• Norms and Correctness
• Basically – But Not Fully
• Willy-Nilly
• Three, Not Two
• Rethinking Phonetic Variation (str→∫tr)
• Der Untergang des Abendlandes
• On the Ground, Boots and All
• The Physiognomy of Speech
• Barbarisms
• The Evisceration of Meaning
• Homage to Ignorance
• Reading Pronunciations
• Manhattan
• Running the Show
• Androgyny and the Feminization of Male Speech
• Estrangement by Colloquialism
• Geekish so Aggrandized
• Error Magnified and Exacerbated
• Router
• Female Nasalization: An Apotropaism?
• Rescued from Banality: The Miraculous Word
• ‘Virtuous’ Redefined
• Poetic Consciousness and the Language of Thought
• Just Semantics
• Anaphora
• Rhyme and Its Impact
• Intrusive R (A Sandhi Phenomenon)
• Profanity in the Age of Depravity
• Pluriverbation (Skill Set, Data Point)
• Sound and Sense in a Language’s Bauplan
• Norm, System, Usage, and the Metalinguistic Function
• Different(ly) From/Than
• Please in the Passive Voice
• The Onomastic Infantilization of Females
• The Linguistic Acknowledgment of Human Identity
• Loya Jirga, If You Will
• Phonostylistics
• Enjoy! Whatever . . . (Calques)
• Glottally Catching The Football
• Espying the Spondaic Anapest, Absolutely
• Associative Meaning Fields: Interlingual Gaps and Overlaps
• Voiceless Vowels and Vowel Loss
• Conflation via Opacity of Constituent Structure
• Stylistic Retention of Unproductive Stress Patterns
• The Emotive Value of Transitivization
• The Meretriciouness of Economy of Effort as Explanans
• Metaphors We Die By (Metaphorically)
• Residual Dialectisms as Shibboleths
• Emotive Force and the Sense of Form (Balaam’s Ass)
• The Function of Hieratic Diction (smite, smote, smitten)
• The Significance of Spontaneous Back-Formations
• A Peculiar Case of Metathesis ([æks] < [æsk])
• Linguistic Anaesthetics
• Moldiferate, v., intr. (Portmanteau Words)
• The Pragmatistic Force of Analogy in Language Structure
• Disfluent like: Toward A Typology
• The Alveolar Flap and Secondary Stress
• Eloquence as Power
• A Grammatical Hyperurbanism
• Linguistic Self-Indulgence and Meaning by Indirection
• Prosody and Emphasis
• Speaking Like One’s Fellows (f.)
• Differential Consciousness of Language
• Foreign Accents and Their Perception
• Etymology, Re-Cognition, and Knowledge
• The Fixed Distribution of Synonyms in Idioms
• Pity and Its Lexical Congeners
• Inadvertent Irony Aggravated by Paronomasia
• What Language Does God Speak?
• Unhorsing the Hegemonic Emphatic Absolutely
• Zero, Nil, and the Philological Method
• When Animals Speak (Gender in Fables)
• Seeing Is Not Hearing
• Multiple, Not Many: The Irruption of Bookishness
• Palatalization Across Word Boundaries
• Accent as Entrée
• American vs. British Versions of Idioms
• Words as Acts (The Cultural Context)
• The Vogue for Portmanteau Words (Stupravity)
• Nicht alles geht nach Regeln (contra Kant)
• Leaning Obama, Voting Romney
• Exactly Wrong
• Idiomaticity (Anent Freedom and Constraint in Language Use)
• Forms of Address (The Dignity of Namelessness)
• The Variability of Inner Speech
• Cacoglossia (Broken English)
• Style Reconceived (Toward a Global Theory)
• Rife with Error (Extemporaneous Speech)
• Über die Motive des menschlichen Handelns (‘On the Motives of Human Behavior’)
• A Possible Metrical Substrate for a Phraseological Cliché (“Exactly Right”)
• Linguistic Decorum and the Meliorative Function of Language
• Language as an Aesthetic Object
• The Promiscuousness of Irony as a Rhetorical Label
• Islands of Englessness in Seas of Normativity
• The Prowess of Systemzwang
• Adjusting Speech to the Linguistic Competence of One’s Interlocutor(s)
• ‘Atrocity’, Not ‘Tragedy’
• Element Order and the Grammar of the Second Amendment
• The Decline of Straight Talk and the Rise of Linguistic Dross
• The Power of Prosody (“Please exit through the rear door.”)
• The Metrical Substrate of a Phraseological Cliché II (“At the End of the Day”)
• Semeiotic Neostructuralism and Language
• “It’s OK by Me” as a Syntactic Calque
• Cultural Cachinnation as a Paralinguistic Phenomenon
• Hic Sunt Leones
• Markedness, Tense-Number Syncretism, and the Etiolation of the Subjunctive
• Nominalism and Realism in Linguistics from a Neostructuralist Perspective
• Reconceiving Linguistics in the Light of Pragmaticism: Language Analysis as Hermeneutic
• Metanalysis as Explanans of a Common Solecism (*between you and I)
• Colloquialism as Emphasis (“ain’t”)
• The Psycholinguistics of Everyday Life (Paroemics)
• A Case of Linguistic Atavism (“kick the can down the road”)
• Hidden in Plain Sight (Allegoresis)
• Vocal Timbre and Authoritative Speech
• The Frenchification of Spanish Words in English (Chávez)
• The Dictionary Errs (Rhymes with Purrs)
• A Variation on Free Variation
• Annoying Speech Mannerisms
• Variable Forms of Address as an Indicator of Social Instability
• Iconicity in Action (Singulative Deverbal Nouns)
• Diagrams and Diagrammatization in Language
• Further Thoughts on Disfluent like
• The Telos of Linguistic Change
• Generational Slippage in the Retention of Obsolescent Vocabulary
• Terms of Affection and Their Gradience
• The Rise of multiple as a Substitute for many
• Misuse of the Word gentleman
• Sound-Sense Alignment of Word Class (Interjections)
• Secondary Stress and Constituent Structure
• The Vanishing Article in Phraseologisms
• Affectation as Incipient Sound Change
• Lost in Transliteration (Russian Hypocoristics in English)
• Prior to Instead of before: A Hyperurbanism
• “That’s a (Really) Great/Good/Interesting Question”
• Phonetic Indicators of Word Unity
• Slave to Ignorance
• Hypertrophic Emphasis in Neology (begrudging[ly])
• Attenuation of Arbitrariness in the Semantics of Quantification
• The Communicative Upshot of Uptalk
• Grammar as Fundament of Thought and Knowledge
• The Uniqueness of Human Language: Meaning by Indirection
• Well and Good (in re “I’m good”)
• Syncope in Consonant Clusters
• A Case of Pleonasm Syntactically Diagrammatized
• ‘Cognitive’ as a Shibboleth and the Irrelevance of Neuroscience
• The Perils of Propitiation in Female Speech
• Persistence of the Irrational in Everyday Speech
• An Alternate Intonational Contour in Sentences with the Vocative
• Grades of Well-Formedness in Language (Cacoglossia)
• Swimming in Semeiosis
• Is There a Logic of Linguistic Error?
• Words in Desuetude
• The Supersessionist Drift of American English
• Degrees of Linguistic Self-Awareness (Anosognosia)
• An Interstitial New Meaning of ‘Multiple’
• “Going Forward” (The Triumph of Agency)
• A Unique Case of Vowel Harmony in English (lambaste)
• Etymology as Present Knowledge
• “Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar” (Goethe, Faust, Pt. 1, “Night”)
• Linguistic Slovenliness as a Failure of Thought
• Stomping Ground (Folk Etymology)
• Style as Troping
• Linguistic Tokens and Grammatical Opacity (“You’re welcome.”)
• You Are What You Say (Verbal Tics)
• Icon You Not (Ruing the Buzzword)
• Statistical Norms of Speech Production
• Words Qualified and Contrasted
• Emphasis in Spoken English and Its Abuse
• Harmony, Linguistic and Musical
• A Heraclitean Gloss on the Nature of Speech
• The Case of the Missing Postposition (“Thanks for having me.”)
• The Lure of Latin (Sherlock Holmes and the Science of Abduction)
• The Mentality of a Neologism (game-changer)
• The Supersession of Literal Meaning (incredibly, unbelievably)
• Twerk: An Etymology
• Accent and Dialect Differentiated
• The Ethical Dative, Lost But Not Forgotten
• Baring the Grammatical Underbelly of a Hypercorrection
• Prestige and Language Change
• Latino and Its Linguistic Congeners
• Adjectival Derivation (anent short- and long-lived)
• Paronomasia in Proverbs (“For every Jack there’s a Jill.”)
• Linguistic Formulas and Sincerity (“Thanks for asking.”)
• The Fading of Oral Transmission of Linguistic Norms
• Drift as the Triumph of the Iconic in Language Change (less vs. fewer)
• Cultural Differences in the Reception of the Graeco-Roman Patrimony
• The Stress of Foreign Nomina Propria (Kiev, Ukraine)
• The Emotive Use of Dialectal or Non-Standard Speech
• Absence of Number Concord in Subject-Predicate Grammar
• The Function of Phonetic Ellipses (Syncope and Voiceless Vowels)
• Auto- and Hetero-Referential so
• Of Twits, Twitters, and Tweaks (Sound-Sense Parallelism as Explanans)
• Language as a Template for the Conceptualization of Reality
• The Tyranny of Usage––Literally (Ahem!)
• Sound as an Icon of Sense (meld)
• Ideology and Semantic Change (sex and gender)
• Tenues and Mediae in English
• Ideology and Grammatical Error (The Feminine Pronouns)
• World-View and Untranslatability (The Case of Yiddish)
• Sinning Against Usage (Dead Last, but Flat Broke)
• Phrase, Not Term
• Barba non facit philosophum (The Power of Proverbs)
• Productive but Wrong (Childish Linguistic Errors)
• Gender-Specific Designations of Human Referents: Vacillations in Usage
• The Mangling of French by Speakers of American English
• Assertion sub rosa (Lengthening of Clause-Final Unstressed Syllables in Female Speech)
• Ersatz English
• Mispronunciations in Ersatz English (colleague)
• Fossilized Speech and Its Episodic Disinterment (“во дни тягостных раздумий о судьбах моей родины”)
• “You Talk Like a Lawyah!”
• Epenthetic N (Neither . . . Nor)
• Unstressed Vowels and the Demoticization of Vocabulary (synod, ebola)
• The Pathos of Everyday Life 1 (Ronkonkoma)
• Ticastic like in Non-Native English
• The Pathos of Everyday Life 2 (eros and agape)
• The Metalinguistic Function (Free Variation and Self-Correction)
• Macaronic Language (A Contemporary Specimen)
• Language and Prestige (The Erroneous Pronunciation of err)
• The Pathos of Everyday Life 3 (Goethe: “Die Nacht schuf tausend Ungeheuer”)
• The Pathos of Everyday Life 4 (“Но с хорошенькими мисс/Я иду на компромисс!”)
• Adjectival Government
• Irrefragably!
• False Analogy (inherent[ly])
• The Stress of Adverbialized Prepositional Phrases
• A Semantico-Syntactic Portmanteau (Enjoy!)
• Of Eths and Thorns
• Hypermetrical Stress for Emphasis in Adverbs
• Desyllabication of /n/ in Consonant Clusters
• The Drift toward Linguistic Hypertrophy in American English
• Latin as the Verbal Weapon of Choice in English
• The Frisson of Etymological Discovery
• The Markedness of the Female Sex
• America’s Linguistic Hegemony and Its Cultural Locus
• The Pathos of Everyday Life 5 (persona ‘mask’)
• Homo habilis and Language: Linguistic Theory as a Theory of Habit
• The Tension between Grammar and Praxis
• Metalinguistic Commentary in Conversation (Error and Normativity in Speech)
• Basically the Englishes
• Muddled Grammar, Muddled Thought (on behalf of ≠ on the part of)
• Hypertrophic Prepositional Complements of Verbs
• Pluralia tantum and Their Contemporary Misconstrual
• Vowel Syncope and Its Functions
• Contraction in Language and Its Stylistic Dimension
• The Vocative and Its Functions in Discourse
• The Pathos of Everyday Life 6 (Language as a Badge of Authenticity)
• Prestige and Language Change
• Speaking like a Native (When the Spirit Moves One)
• Non-Pathological Agrammatism
• Word Length and Emphasis (incredibly)
• Habit, Consciousness, and the Rule of Grammar
• Ticastic so
• Semantic Linearization and Linguistic Hypertrophy
• Paralinguistic Differences between the Sexes (“Vive la différence!”)
• Of Grexit, Brexit, and Other Portmanteau Words
• Normativity, Habit, and Willful Mistakes
• Russian Patronymics
• When Only Learnèd (Recondite, Recherché) Words Will Do
• Grammatical Gender and the Epicene (Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi)
• The Semantic Force of Univerbation
• Sound-Meaning Relations as the Engines of Linguistic Change
• Hypertrophization Continues Apace (definitive, secretive)
• A Grammatical Case of Euphemism (pass)
• Incomplete Voicing in Initial Plosives: A Survival of Immigrant Speech?
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 7 (Authenticity)
• Does the Gorilla’s Avoirdupois Matter?
• The Epidemic of Verbal Misgovernment
• Meaning Is Not ‘In the Head’
• Fear of Linguistic Indirection: British ‘if you like’
• Is Intonation Iconic?
• Shunning the First-Person Pronoun: Onomastic Reference to Oneself
• ‘Before’, Not ‘In Front of’
• The Glossary of Useful Words 1: ‘meretricious’
• The Glossary of Useful Words 2: ‘importune’
• Japanese Prosody and Its Distortion Revisited (Hiroshima)
• The Glossary of Useful Words 3: ‘platitudinous’
• Structuralism as a Theory of Language in the Light of Peircean Pragmaticism
• The Gossary of Useful Words 4: ‘perfervid’
• The Mispronunciation of Wimbledon
• The Glossary of Useful Words 5: ‘captious’
• Self-Awareness and Its Linguistic Dimension
• Prolegomenon to a New Primer on Language
• The Glossary of Useful Words 6: ‘internecine’
• Flashing One’s Ethnic Badge Linguistically
• Language as the Laissez-Passer Par Excellence
• The Glossary of Useful Words 7: ‘meretricious’
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 8 (Russian Proverb)
• The Integrity of Idioms (‘wrap one’s head around’)
• The Advent of Uptalk in British English
• The Rise of Compound Adjectives Involving Postposition (‘food-insecure’ et al.)
• The Glossary of Useful Words 8: ‘indecorous’
• The Vagaries of Yiddish vs. Hebrew as Reflected in American English
• Living Norms in Language
• Meaning and the Continuum in Language
• Grammatical Errors and Imperfect Learning (Verbal and Adjectival Government)
• The Glossary of Useful Words 9: ‘pullulate’
• Orthoepic Shibboleths (*good-paying and *electóral)
• The Sense of Grammar (Mood and Number)
• The Glossary of Useful Words 10 & 11: ‘sycophantic’ & ‘calumniate’
• The Power of the Amphibrach (treméndous)
• Capturing the Love Object in Words
• For Emphasis (absolútely)
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 9 (Variations on the Speaking Self)
• Meaning and the Trirelative Semiotic Orientation of Language
• When Only a Foreign Locution Will Serve (German erblich belastet)
• The Groves of Academe (Not Academia)
• Self-Irony and the Linguistic Fashioning of Personality
• The Glossary of Useful Words 12: punctilious
• Idiosyncrasies in Lexica (Tea with/without Sugar in Russian)
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 10: Mother’s Day 2017
• Addendum: Lost in Translation
• Speech Styles and Their Pathological Misuse
• Degrees of Veracity of Utterances (“to be honest”)
• Grammar and Usage: The Abuse of the Vocative
• American English as a Typologically Hypertrophic Language
• Language as Semeiotic: The Example of the Russian Verb
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 11: Japan Redivivus
• Linguistic Purism
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 12: Words with Private Meanings
• Syntactic Change Is Always Semantic Change: A Case in Progress
• For the Nonce: Spontaneous Neologisms in Speech
• Done and Dusted: Paronomasia as a Form of Emphasis
• Is Intonation Iconic? The Question Refined
• The Second Amendment Revisited (Anent the Recent Events in Las Vegas)
• Stress Retraction and the Principle of Marked Beginnings
• Teleology, Markedness, and Linguistic Change (Strong Verb Ablaut)
• “Patently Incorrect:” The Interplay of Grammar, Norm, and Habit in Speech
• The Alogical Effacement of Meaning
• ‘ Ab und zu Exzellenz.’ (Repetition and the Lure of Excessive Metaphoricity)
• The Waxing and Waning of Phraseologisms (British ‘if you like’ and American ‘if you will’ Revisited)
• Adjectivization of Verb Phrases and Its Contemporary Vogue
• Is the So-Called ‘Vocal Fry’ an Apotropaism?
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 13: Hypertrophic Noses Everywhere
• Violations of Well-Formedness
• Archaisms and Gravitas: A Cross-Linguistic Example from the New Testament
• “Awesome” and “Fantastic” (The Triumph of the Phatic)
• Why Do People Say Things Like “From the get/git-go?”
• The Arbitrariness of Meaning
• Evaluating Conversational Content as a Matter of Linguistic Habit
• Synonymy and Terms of Use
• Social Values and the Stiff Upper Lip as Reflected in Language
• An Amuse-Bouche from My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki’s Revenge
• Anosognosic Repetition of Words
• Meaning is Not in One’s Head but in the Semiotic Web
• Absolutely, Great, Fantastic, Tremendous (Trump-Speak Unmasked)
• Linguistic Norms and Their Violation as a Shibboleth
• Logorrhea and Public Speech
• Clichés as Failures of Thought
• “If I’d Had My Druthers” (Form as Part of Meaning)
• How Some Other Linguists Assess Y-H-B’s Work (ca. 2011)
• Every Creature Wants to Express Itself
• Interrogative Intonation in the Service of Politesse
• Schwa in Unstressed Syllables as between British and Amderican English
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 14: On the Sociology of Knowledge
• Syntactic Arbitrariness and Analogical Leveling in Language Change
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 15: Two Russian Proverbs and a Poem in Prose
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 16: When Words Fail One
• Asserting One’s Bona Fides
• Vocabulary as an Indicator of Intelligence
• Norms of Professional Jargons
• Broad and Flat A in American English Redivivus
• The Lability of Grammatical Categories in Contemporary American English
• The Pronunciation of Foreign Words in English
• Basically Rampant, No Longer Couchant
• Change in Grammar as a Change in Conceptual Structure (“based on” vs. “based around”)
• Repetition Compulsion and Anosognosia in Language Use
• Synonymy, Semantic Distinctions, and the Uniqueness of Russian
• Mispronunciation and the Limits of Linguistic Tolerance
• Addendum re Mispronunciation
• Mindless Speech
• The Mispronunciation of the Buzzword mantra
• Addendum re mantra
• Stylistic Integrity and Grammatical Variation (“It is I” vs. “It’s me.”)
• Trans-Language Distortions in Pronunciation
• Language as an Aesthetic Object
• Vacillation in the Stress of Ukraine
• The Contemporary Prevalence of Syntactic Dross (“to be honest with you,” etc.)
• How Languages Change
• The Glossary of Useful Words 13: Vexatious
• The English Obstruents Revisited: A Semiotic Analysis
• British Retraction of Stress in Borrowings from French
• The Glossary of Useful Words: gobsmack
• Self-Aggrandizement as the Subcutaneous Motive of Current Media Speech
• Linguistic Habit as an Index of Cultural Fact
• Criteria Is Not a Singular Form
• Linguistic Fads
• Humor Is Not Necessarily Leavening: Platitudes and Causerie
• You Are What You Say (Redivivus)
• The Glossary of Useful Words 15: ‘redoubtable’
• Grammar in the Time of the Plague: The Malleability of Language
• Trump’s Incessant Repetition of Certain Words as an Indication of an Underlying Pathology
• Repeating A Post from May 2013: “That’s A Really Good/Great Question”
• Language as Semeiotic: The Peircean Underpinnings
• Whatever Happened to ‘splendid’?
• Speaker’s Vocal Timbre as an Inspirer of Auditor’s Confidence
• Repetition Is the Mother of Learning
• The Aesthetic Criterion in Evaluations of Ordinary Speech: Deviations from the Standard, Foreign and Domestic
• British English ‘if you like’: An Apotropaism?
• Intimate (Hypocoristic) Word Play in the Time of the Plague
• The Glossary of Useful Words 16: ‘garrulous’
• Anosognosic Speech Habits: Just an Idiosyncrasy?
• Ignorantia linguae non excusat
• “Wow!” and Other Linguistic Detritus
• The Glossary of Useful Words 17: ‘otiose’
• †Jacobus Primus
• Enjoy!
• Prolegomenon to The Logic of Language: A Semiotic Study of Speech
• Irregular Assimilative Voicing in English
• The Glossary of Useful Words 17: ‘vainglory’
• Grasping at Straws
• Persistence of a Catachrestic Phrase (*good-paying)
• Buzz Phrases (“in terms of”)
• When English Just Won’t Serve, French Comes to the Rescue
• Further to Linguistic Dross in American Media Language
• Differences in Speech Styles: Garrulity vs. Taciturnity
• “Hesitancy” vs. “Hesitation:” The Dominance of Grammatical Structure
• The Glossary of Useful Words 18: ‘afflatus’
• The Glossary of Useful Words 19: ‘quixotic’
• The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 17: Molière Redivivus Redivivus
• The Glossary of Useful Words 20: ‘ebullient’
• The Persistence of Linguistic Change (str > shtr)
• Further Thoughts on the Analogy of Language to Music
• Addendum re “Language as Music”
• The Glossary of Useful Words 21: ‘punctilious’
• The Glossary of Useful Words 22: ‘rebarbative’
• Perversion of Meaning (‘caveat’)
• The Meaninglessness of Gestures Accompanying Speech
• Senseless Idioms
• Phonetic Fatuity: The Pronunciation of Taliban
• What, Me Worry?
• Overuse of Words and Concomitant Loss of Semantic Power
• New Uses for Function Words: Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases
• New Book on Linguistics and Semiotics
• Proposing a Neologism (= new word): Covidaceous
• The Emotive Value of Yiddish
• A New Article by Y-H-B
• Ukraine Yet Again
• The Aesthetics of Speech and Speaking
• Paronomasia in Everyday American Speech
• Comment by Robert Rothstein on Last Post
• Language in the Context of Interpretation and Cognition
• ‘Around’ as an All-Purpose Preposition
• The Last Straw Revisited
• ‘Awesome’: A Current Speech Tic Among Younger Speakers
• The Logic of Language: A Semiotic Study of Speech
• The Word ‘Mentor’ Pronounced Contrary to Its Meaning
• Praise for The Logic of Language
• Book Launch of The Logic of Language
• Addendum Re Book Launch
• Guest Post by Jo Carubia
• Awesome, Perfect, Love It
• Language and Tradition
• Language, Literature, and Poetics
• Raimo Aulis Anttila (1935-2023)
• “For the Love of Language”
• Semantic Expansion: The Case of ‘guy’
• Redefining Arbitrariness in Language
• The Power of the Written Word: Orthography Trumps Grammar
• Roman Jakobson in Retrospect
• Live-Stream for MCL Event, Thursday, 5/18, at 5:30 p.m.
• Michael Shapiro 55th Year In Publishing
• Marianne Shapiro (1940-2003)
• Remembering Romka (alias Roman) Jakobson (1896-1986)
• Anent Marianne Shapiro (1940-2003)
• When the Germans Take Ownership of Foreign Onomastics
• Country–Who? Animacy Triumphant
• Is There Room for Chance in Language Change?
• Mind-Set: A Noisome Buzzword
• The New All-Purpose Referencer (“in terms of”)
• Do Books Have a Fate? (Apropos of The Speaking Self)
• Anosognosia and Political Speak
• Reluctant, Not Reticent
• The Glossary of Useful Words 23: ‘supererogatory’
• The Voiding of Literal Meaning through Overuse (‘absolutely’)
• The Glossary of Useful Words 24: ‘cachinnate’