Metaphor Hacker
linguist
The brain is a bad metaphor for language
Note: This was intended to be a brief note. Instead it developed into a monster post that took me two weeks of stolen moments to write. It’s very light on non-blog references but they exist. Nevertheless, it is still easy to find a number of oversimplifications, conflations, and other imperfections below. The general thrust of [...]
Literally: Triumph of pet peeve over matter
have a number of pet peeves about how people use language. I am genuinely annoyed by the use of apostrophes before plural of numerals or acronyms like 50′s or ABC’s. But because I understand how language works, I keep my mouth shut. The usage has obviously moved on. I don’t think, ABC’s is wrong or [...]
Why Chomsky doesn’t count as a gifted linguist
Somebody commented on the Language Log saying “of course [...] Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist” http://j.mp/9Q98Bx and for some reason, to use a Czech idiom, the handle of the jar repeatedly used to fetch water just fell off. Meaning, I’ve had enough. I think we should stop thinking of Chomsky as a gifted linguist. [...]
