Wordorigins.org

There are a lot of books about language out there, but it is rare to find one that combines both fun and rigorous scholarship. Usually, a book is either written for a general audience and lacks notes and bibliography, making it all but useless for anyone who is halfway serious about the subject. Or it is a dry, scholarly tome, of little interest to all but the most diehard language bugs. Patricia T. O’Conner’s and Stewart Kellerman’s Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language is one of those rare books that hits the sweet spot, combining a light-hearted and easy style with rigorous research and useful notes. Any language lover should put this one near the top of their must-read list.

Wordnik.com is a new online dictionary that has as its goal to include as much information possible about “all” the words in English. The idea is that an online dictionary should not be restricted by the space limitations of print. I haven’t had much time to play with it, but it looks good at initial glance, and it’s created by Erin McKean, Grant Barrett, and Orion Montoya, so it has a good pedigree. 

Ben Zimmer over at Visual Thesaurus has a blog post about a newly found early citation for jas from New Orleans. It’s from 1916, so it doesn’t change the prevailing theory of the origin of jazz, but early citations like this are always interesting.

UC Berkeley linguist and NPR contributor Geoffrey Nunberg was interviewed on KQED’s Forum radio program on 27 May. It’s an interesting discussion touching on a variety of topics, including changes in political speech from the Bush to Obama administrations, whether um is a word, and whether or not Pluto should be called a “planet.” It’s definitely worth a listen.

Newspapers are extraordinarily bad at reporting on scientific findings. A number of factors conspire to make this so. Reduced budgets force reporters to rely on press releases and flacks for story ideas and information—which leads to the printing of sensationalist claims. Reporters don’t have the time (or the scientific chops) to fully understand the implications of a story. Editors want a “hook” that makes a story interesting, even if that hook isn’t real. Journalists don’t do research—they do interviews; which results in the stories being based on arguments from authority, considered to be one of the weakest forms of argument. And newspapers have a bias for stories that contain conflict; they often inflate (or even manufacture) opposing views to create this conflict.

Reporting on linguistics is no different, except NY Times reporter Nicolas Wade has a penchant for getting stories about advances in linguistics horribly wrong. Getting one story wrong is one thing, but he’s been doing it for years. One would think the journalistic standards of the “paper of record” would be better, but evidently not. They continue to print his ill-informed articles on linguistics.