linguistlaura

Someone on Reddit was trying to identify the fibre their yarn was made from, and someone suggested burning a bit of it since burning hair/wo...

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

I went to London last week and walked past this coffee shop, which I had heard of because it pops up on google maps. It's called Fuckoff...

Last November I read The Goldfinch  by Donna Tartt. It was really good, incredibly readable (I whizzed through it) and engaging and moving. ...

Following on from my last post about mishearing words in connected speech, here's an example of when I deliberately do this: covert swea...

A fellow linguist tweeted (ages ago): To me, this is ungrammatical. For me, the pattern goes like this, where the asterisk next to (4) ...

Ian McMillan, the poet, does a lot of stuff on the radio about language. He's keen on accents, particularly Yorkshire ones, and recently...

We all know that linguists love to swear and lecturers love to shock their new students, so yesterday in my introductory lecture on morpholo...

The other day, Ben Zimmer at Language Log covered the way that Pussy Riot (the name of a Russian punk band currently in the news ) can be r...

I saw this image on the internets illustrating this poor chap's inability to use commas (and knowledge of the difference between the sp...

Ok, so like, I am not a prescriptivist, blah blah blah, but I do tell people how to use apostrophes for a living, so I found this momentari...