Trend Results : Mark Liberman
Blog Post Results (1-20 of 147)
FILTER RESULTS ►Protesting too much
A guest post from Tony Kroch: The line "The Lady doth protest too much, me thinks" from Hamlet that Mark Liberman blogged about at the end of last month struck me because it encapsulates in one sentence several significant changes that the English language has undergone. We are lucky that the written record is rich enough [...]
Anatomy of a spambot
We've often had occasion to wonder how spammy blog comments are linguistically constructed. (See, most recently, Mark Liberman's post, "Numerous upon the written content material," in which he refers to spam comments as "aleatoric sub-poetry.") Now, on Quartz, David Yanofsky and Zachary M. Seward expose how spam comments are engineered: Comment spam follows a formula, which [...]
This is not me
Paolo Lucchesi, "AQ’s Matt Semmelhack and Mark Liberman to open Bon Marché in Market Square", Inside Scoop SF 2/22/2013: Matt Semmelhack and Mark Liberman — the team behind the celebrated AQ in SoMa — are the first restaurant tenants of the big Market Square development (a.k.a. the Twitter building), where they plan to open a street-level, [...]
Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2
The question of whether or not there's a word for "nerd" in Chinese has recently come up, in Mark Liberman's "'Your passport has just been stamped for entry into the Land of Bullshit'" Mark quotes Tom Scocca, [...]
SPAN OFF THE ROAD.
Mark Liberman at the Log posts a message from a correspondent who quotes a news story that says "The actor and comedian span off the road and crashed the high-powered vehicle into a tree" and asks "'Span'? I've never seen or heard this before in my life. Show More Summary
Quintuple Negative
(Eugene Volokh) Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) quotes one, from The Age (Feb. 5, 2013) describing a litigant’s assertion: Justice Sifris erred in not finding Mr Goldberg was wrong in failing to set aside the summonses.
Japanese postcard puzzle
In "Postcard language puzzle", Mark Liberman enlisted the aid of Language Log readers in deciphering the writing on two old postcards mailed from Mallorca in 1912-1913. The result was a swift and stunning success, an amazing demonstration of spontaneous online collaboration of linguists spread across the globe.
Now, Bruce Balden has sent in an even [...]
Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism / Left vs. Right
(Eugene Volokh) Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) has an interesting post on usage debates and political debates; you should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt: [T]he insistence on regulation by prescriptive “rules”, in whatever...Show More Summary
No word for "privacy" in Russian?
Reader and fan Will Thompson wrote to Mark Liberman, who passed his letter on to me, about a recent article by Ellen Barry in The New York Times, discussing a book by the Russian political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin in which he explains weird/different American cultural norms to Russians. Will notes that towards the end, the [...]
Weigelian syllepsis
Mark Liberman noted (as did Neal Whitman on his Literal-Minded blog) a case of syllepsis in an Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf: "What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for [Jennifer] Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election." But Weigel offered up [...]
WITH VOICE OR WITHOUT.
Mark Liberman had a post at the Log quoting a correspondent as follows:I read your article on the alphabet olympics yesterday and followed one of the links, and then one of its links, and so on. I was merrily traipsing thru the internet...Show More Summary
Come on without, come on within
John Wells, "with, regretful", 10/19/2012: I found myself being just a tiny bit querulous when commenting on a posting in Language Log. […] In reply Mark Liberman, the usually very knowledgeable writer of the post in question, said just Short answer: I don't know. I've never heard a discussion of this point of pronunciation variation, except with [...]
Do Surveys Overestimate Political Ignorance
(Ilya Somin) In this recent Language Log post, Mark Liberman argues that surveys overestimate the extent of political ignorance. Unfortunately, his evidence is far from compelling. He notes a few examples where scholars or reporters simply misstated the results of a particular survey. That surely happens. But it doesn’t account for more than a small fraction of [...]
Gov. Chris Christie’s Speech and First Person Singular Pronouns
(Eugene Volokh) Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) is unimpressed with the claim that Gov. Chris Christie “used the word ‘I’ 30 times, plus a couple of ‘me’s’ and ‘my’s’ tossed in for seasoning” in his speech, and that this somehow says something important about Christie. Liberman had in the past responded similarly to those who made similar [...]
IN TACT.
Mark Liberman at the Log reports on an eggcorn that had involves a perfectly understandable reanalysis of the word intact. "Reader RP" noticed the expression "so long as Roma culture remains in some kind of tact" on the Guardian comment...Show More Summary
ALL IN ALL.
Mark Liberman made a Log post a while back in which he discussed the phrase "all in all":It's not syntactically or semantically transparent ? we don't say "some in all" or "some in some" or anything else remotely close. The fact that "in all" also exists helps a bit, but it's still pretty opaque. Show More Summary
“And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well”
In our recent discussion of plagiarism and fake quotes, a commenter points to two recent posts by Mark Liberman (here and here) where Liberman links to about a zillion cases of journalists publishing quotes that were never said. He goes into some detail about two journalists from the New Yorker: Jared Diamond, who created quotes [...]
Parsing in pajamas
THIS is becoming a theme week on Johnson. Interested in how well computer parsers can do with natural language, I wrote to Mark Liberman and Philip Resnik to ask about the best parsers out there. The easiest-to-use one available with a web interface is the Stanford Parser. Show More Summary
Dante Updated
(Eugene Volokh) From Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log): There’s a special place in purgatory reserved for scientists who make bold claims based on tiny effects of uncertain origin; and an extra-long sentence is imposed on those who also keep their data secret, publishing only hard-to-interpret summary statistics from statistical models. Show More Summary
Diving deeper into the metaphorical molasses
My column in Sunday's Boston Globe is on a popular topic here at Language Log Plaza: the multitudinous metaphors spun to explain the Higgs boson discovery to a non-scientific audience. Metaphors noted by Mark Liberman in his two posts (from divine wraiths to smoking ducks) make cameos in the column as well, and I dig [...]
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