A blog about language and linguistics by Joe McVeigh
Google has a style guide for technical writers and from what I’ve read, it’s pretty good. It’s short and sweet on the details, but that’s fine. The guide is direct and it’s not meant as a general writer’s guide. But it makes comments on the passive voice, so you can probably guess what’s coming. First, Continue reading Google’s Bad Voice
An article in the Sunday Times crossed my eyeballs this week. It’s called “Can song lyrics tell us how society is changing?” and the obvious answer is But there’s a bit of linguistics in here (and no, it’s not good), so let’s dig in. The article is by Tom Calver and he says “I have Continue reading Song lyrics and culture
George Will wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled “Five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out”. It is not good. Let’s see why. First of all, George Will is still alive?! Holy shit! Second of all, this post stinks. George Will clearly had a deadline to meet and he had Continue reading George Will’s incorrect and dangerous complaints about language
A couple of weeks ago, Helsinki’s daily paper Helsingin Sanomat published an article called “Lauri Lassila huomasi, että osa hänen ystävistään ei osaa puhua enää suomea, vaikka haluaisikin” (Lauri Lassila noticed that his friends can’t speak Finnish anymore, even though they want to). It might seem like a harmless article about the youths. But as Continue reading Helsinki s largest paper believes…
I recently heard from an old friend who had stumbled upon my website. He said he was shocked when he read this line from my bio: My family says that anymore at the end of the last sentence sounds wrong, but it’s all good. This line piqued his interest because he also puts anymore at Continue reading Positive “anymore”
But this time it’s on purpose? What?! Yesterday, Benji Smith became the main character on Writer Twitter. It turns out that Mr. Smith has created a database of novels that he obtained through probably illegal means. Smith used this database in his Prosecraft project, which published statistics about each novel, such as its word count, Continue reading More misidentified passives
Content warning: This post is about harmful language and it contains words that are used to dehumanize people. Please take caution. In April 2023, the Atlantic published a 2,500-word opinion piece complaining about language equity style guides. The attack on these guides is misleading, wrong, and harmful. It continually misrepresents the style guides. It shows Continue reading George Packer and…
Is this dude about to mansplain mansplaining? Hoo boy. Here we go. This is going to be a long post. I’ll go through each part of the article with my usual irreverence, but don’t be fooled. Thomas’s ideas about language are a real danger to women. So I’ll comment seriously on that as well. Let’s Continue reading Dr. Andrew Thomas tries to mansplain mansplaining
On May 15, Janne Saarikivi published a turd of an opinion column in YLE (Finland’s national broadcasting company). The article is a prime example of nationalistic fearmongering. It has the appearance of being well-thought out and reasoned, like the contemplations of a reflective scholar, but a peek under the hood shows that it’s just repackaged Continue reading Janne Saarikivi’s Fascism Lite, or…
There’s a new linguistic database in town! [Duffman voice: Oooooh, yeah!] It’s called Grambank and according to its website it was “designed to be used to investigate the global distribution of features, language universals, functional dependencies, language prehistory and interactions between language, cognition, culture and environment.” Sounds great! I haven’t had too much time to Continue…