linguistlaura

Beavertown Brewery currently have these billboard adverts up, with the slogan Out of this world beer. Drank on Earth :  Photo: @nicholasd on...

At our students' graduations this week, a colleague told me about a (non-canonical) ballet step which, because of the particular way tha...

I'm learning Welsh on Duolingo. Most people in our department are doing a language on it, in some cases for practical purposes but for m...

Linguists are liable to stop mid-conversation to write down something they or their interlocutor said, if it was linguistically interesting....

I've held off on blogging about Wordle, because everyone else did it, and because I didn't have anything particular to say. People t...

There is a film called Willy's Wonderland, starring Nicolas Cage, and it is bizarre and wonderful. You should watch it. Cage has to spen...

How many times do you need to use a word in one piece of writing or speech before it's too many?  In the novel 'We' by Yevgeny Z...

The verb disappear  is normally what we call 'intransitive', which means that it has one participant: the person who disappears. Lik...

There's a sort of trope that Japanese has no swear words, and instead you insult someone simply by using the wrong level of politeness. ...

[Please note that this is a schedule post and I am currently observing my union (UCU)'s industrial action over pensions, pay, workloads,...

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.] In a recent tweet, whic...

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.] You should always learn...

CW: mention of public indecency behaviour in the tweet linked and below, before we get to the linguistics.  This reply to a tweet of Derren ...

 Please enjoy this nice linguistic observation made by someone on twitter:  The pronunciation of “plantain” When a word has the suffix “-tai...

I walked past a board advertising a new housing development and it boasted that the new flats would have integrated appliances to kitchen . ...

The word layperson  meant, originally, a non-ordained member of the church. Well, actually maybe it didn't since it's apparently pre...

I've just finished reading a book called 'Statistics without tears' by Derek Rowntree. It's a basic tutorial on statistical ...

As you know, me and my co-author were running a survey recently that lots of you took part in (thanks!). We had 959 responses by the time it...

All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb lead , which is standardly spelt led , dead. Or ded. I'd...

I'm not sure if this counts as an eggcorn , which is a phrase that is reinterpreted based on some apparent meaning. It can often reveal ...