Lingua Franca

Language and writing in academe.

November 22, 2016 by Lucy Ferriss

Not Normal

I’m a very recent convert to the idea of normal.

My allergy to the word has come from two separate strands. One is a trend I’ve noticed among students for at least 20 years, wherein they apply the word normal to forms they consider standard. My creative-writing students, for instance, decry John Barth’s as being “not normal” stories. My literature students ask if I want them to write a “normal” essay. I want to shake them by the shoulders and say, “There is no normal story! There is …

November 21, 2016 by Ben Yagoda

The Collected Tweets of President-Elect Donald Trump

In a 60 Minutes piece that aired the Sunday after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Lesley Stahl asked Trump if he would continue to use Twitter. He replied, in part:

It’s a great form of communication. Now, do I say I’ll give it up entirely and throw out, that’s a tremendous form — I pick up– I’m picking up now, I think I picked up yesterday 100,000 people. I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out. … I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at al…

November 20, 2016 by Anne Curzan

Thanksgiving Victuals

This week many of us are thinking about or shopping for Thanksgiving victuals. If, that is, we are people who use the word victuals. Otherwise, we’re thinking about or shopping for food.

The word victual(s) is on my mind not because it is Thanksgiving week but instead because a Lingua Franca reader mentioned the word in response to my column about spelling reform and supercede/supersede. The anonymous commenter noted that the spelling supercede probably wasn’t going to be the end of civilizati…

November 17, 2016 by William Germano

Bases Loaded

No, not the Cubs. (Too late.) Or the election. (Too soon, and also too late.)

I’m puzzling over the usage shift from based on to base off and based off of, a development that has only picked up speed in the student writing I encounter. I hear it in spoken English too, though it makes its strongest impression on me in what is meant as formal writing. My Lingua Franca colleague Anne Curzan made note of the construction a few years back, but its persistence makes it worth revisiting.

A couple o…

November 16, 2016 by Ben Yagoda

Literally, Seriously?

In the days after last week’s election, I seemed to encounter one observation everywhere.

“The American establishment took Trump literally but not seriously, whereas his supporters appear to have taken him seriously but not literally.” —David Aaronovitch, The Times (of London), November 10.
“I read a perfect election summation: The people who were against Mr. Trump took him literally but not seriously. His supporters took him seriously but not literally.” –Glenn Beck, The New York Times, Novemb…

November 15, 2016 by Lucy Ferriss

Words of Solace, Words of Action

Votes did not save us from the precipice last week. Yet, so often, language has buoyed us — given us wings, or perhaps simply currents of warm air, to carry us onto steadier ground. I have no such words of my own, but in the past 10 days I’ve been hearing some wise voices, from other dark times. Here are a few:

From W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose building…

November 14, 2016 by Allan Metcalf

From N.H. to La.: ‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ Update No. 6

What do bob house, boo-hag, and bullnozer have to do with each other?

In case you’re not familiar with these terms, a bob house is what people in New Hampshire, some of them at least, call an ice-fishing shanty. A boo-hag, in South Carolina, is a kind of ghost, by one account a “witchy woman … who can unzip her corporeal body and hang it up like a coat.” And a bullnozer, in the Appalachians and vicinity, is just another name for bulldozer.

But what do they have in common? Maybe a story of a bo…

November 13, 2016 by Geoffrey Pullum

The Unoriginality of Orwell’s Critique of Language

I had always imagined that the ideas Orwell so tediously overstates and disingenuously defends in his megafamous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (henceforth P&EL), though impractical and dishonest, were original with him. But I discovered by accident recently that they aren’t.

The best-known theme of P&EL concerns how long words encourage intellectual laziness, cloaking thought in airy abstraction and lending a polysyllabic patina of respectability to obnoxious political and legal…

November 10, 2016 by Anne Curzan

Can ‘Supercede’ Supersede?

Last March, I posted a spelling challenge here on Lingua Franca: Which irregular spellings are you willing to part with? Earlier this term, the graduate-student instructor for my introductory English linguistics course gave this challenge to students, and we got one suggestion that had not occurred to me. And I’m sold.

If one thing replaces another thing, it supersedes it

Is that how you spell supersede? Or do you want the word to have a c and be supercede?

The spellchecker on my computer just b…

November 9, 2016 by Geoffrey Pullum

Sexual-Abuse Gangs and Racism

Back in August, a huge public inquiry into child sexual abuse in Britain lost its third leader when Judge Lowell Goddard resigned as chair. The Times reported her as having remarked that the reason Britain has so many pedophiles is “because it has so many Asian men.” That assertion (which she firmly denies making) has been condemned as racist. I wish people would use the dictionary a bit more. Racism is a thesis — the single greatest ideological evil in human history, in my view. It holds tha…

About This Blog

Posts on Lingua Franca present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.

Questions? Ideas? You can reach us at linguafranca@chronicle.com.

Anne Curzan

Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she also holds appointments in linguistics and the School of Education. Her publications include Gender Shifts in the History of English and How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction. She talks about trends in the English language in a weekly segment, "That's What They Say," on Michigan Radio. View her TEDx talk on language here.

Lucy Ferriss

Lucy Ferriss is writer in residence at Trinity College in Connecticut and the author of literary criticism, a memoir, and seven books of fiction. Her Web site is lucyferriss.com.

William Germano

@WmGermano

William Germano is dean of humanities and social sciences and a professor of English literature at Cooper Union. He has recently published the third edition of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books (2016, University of Chicago Press).

Rose Jacobs

Rose Jacobs is an American freelance journalist and English teacher at the Technical University of Munich. Before moving to Germany, she worked for the Financial Times as a reporter and editor, in New York and London.

Amitava Kumar

@amitavakumar

Amitava Kumar is professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of a novel and several books of non fiction. His Web site is www.amitavakumar.com.

Allan Metcalf

Allan Metcalf is professor of English at MacMurray College, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, forensic linguist, and author of From Skedaddle to Selfie: Words of the Generations, as well as OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word and five other books on language. His website is allanmetcalf.net.

Geoff Pullum

Geoffrey K. Pullum is professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. He wrote (with Rodney Huddleston) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002) and A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (2005). Some of his writing for Language Log is collected in the book Far From the Madding Gerund (2006). His personal Web site is at http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/.

Ilan Stavans

@IlanStavans

Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His books include Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language and Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion. He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the publisher of Restless Books, devoted to contemporary literature from around the world, and co-founder of Great Books Summer Program.