I have no wish to see a curling semi That’s my weak Winter Olympics gag

had a fun chat w/ @samcorbin.bsky.social about language change! she cut out i think fully 45 minutes where we just talked about Mean Girls (2004) but blessedly kept in the fun pronoun stuff

"English is not my first language. But its ok... It's not America's first language either." Bad Bunny

You're both right for your own Englishes. Listen here: dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciatio...

Le nom, le verbe, la particule. A lovely large hand-colored folding table mapping the parts of speech and their relations. From Louis Gaultier’s "Atlas de grammaire" (c. 1801–1818).

I'd watch a muppet show movie where the muppets infiltrate an academic conference.

part of me still can't believe the East Wing was completely destroyed and there have been no negative consequences or reports on whether items inside were properly archived or not

7 FEBRUARY 1776, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: Newly recruited Private Obadiah Brown, who only arrived at the Boston siege lines four days ago, records in his diary that “Two Sodiers Drank 33 glases of Brandy & Gin one Died.”

Please enjoy this super Brighton-y fan-made video for LCD Soundsystem's Dance Yrself Clean. It's so lovely if you're a fan of the band or the city. Then I'll tell you my anecdote about one of the buildings in the video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj9S...

Historian here President Abraham Lincoln opposed the Mexican War as a land grab for slavery when he was a first term Congressman from Illinois.

Just a slob like one of us

"Minnesotans cooperate because of the cold weather" is a sort of environmental determinism that I tackled in my one and only Pacific Standard (RIP) piece 10 years ago psmag.com/news/can-a-t...

It was never about books, though, was it?

The tricky thing about calling out linguistic [orig. AmE] BS in tabloid newspapers is that doing so might send more traffic (money) to the BS purveyors. So, this time I didn't read the articles I was commenting on. You can be the judge of whether that works:

they should make a movie series about how it’s irresponsible to use technology to mess with the natural order of things for profit

Possibly the quickest blog post I've written in at least 15 years...but ridiculous times call for ridiculous measures Nostalgia for present-day British English (in the "news") separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2026/02/nost...

Only in Kentucky: from Kingdom Come to Hell for Certain in under 90 minutes

Language groups in Western Europe

Added to the 'had to read this three times to parse it' pile. Now that's what I call AI Iegal tool hits.

This took me fucking ages

@lynneguist.bsky.social FYI :-)

There goes my first-guess strategy. www.tomsguide.com/gaming/wordl...

Everyone's jaws are on the floor because of the disemboweling of US research, and yet...

Huh, have you seen this @byagoda.bsky.social ?

Evergreen

Great news! The Project Muse Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) threshold has been met, so all 2026 content in Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America will (once again) be open access at no cost. So: send us your manuscripts! muse.jhu.edu/journal/540

The word armadillo is borrowed from Spanish and simply means “little armored one.” But an even better word for an armadillo, in my opinion, is the Nahuatl ayotochtli. It means “turtle rabbit.”

Think of all the tips lost.

Today I started teaching "English in the United States" for possibly the last time. It's a weird time to be teaching it, and the first time I'm teaching it since English was declared "official language"

I wasn't going to say anything till I was sure you'd all got the pangram, but... (Words already on the blog: separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2023/04/nyt-...)

Much more common outside US

I am the unnamed "global analyst" from Pew Research Center who is "pouring cold water" on claims of Christian revival among young adults in Britain. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/religion/article/christian-revival-pew-study-gen-z-6dbl8n3wg

cc: everyone panicking

As someone with 25-year NIH funded lab, I endorse. Linking NIH and DHS/ICE funding in the same bill is blood money

Join us next week!

as a left-wing American, I feel the need to warn the British something they already know: if you have a choice between milquetoast centrist fucks everyone hates and literal Nazis, please don’t make the same mistake that we did

Hiring! 📢 We have a three-year position open at the University of Oulu for a Doctoral Researcher in English. Not only will you get to study social interaction in an interesting setting, you'll also get to work with the nicest* people in the business. See announcement below. *biased statement

Another freaking f-word. New post for @stronglang.bsky.social about "freaking" as a euphemistic intensifier: stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/a... 🐦🐦

So you agree? You know it’s useless?

Today's antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "Terrestrial", for a (universal) language spoken on Earth, from 1944 to 1936. sfdictionary.com/view/2789/te...

New to me: use of 'to grieve' to mean 'to file a grievance claim'. OED doesn't have it. Merriam-Webster does. AHD has it and has a Usage Note (see link) which says "relatively uncommon outside of the sphere of labor and management disputes". Is it known in BrE? ahdictionary.com/word/search....

Today I am publishing what I believe to be the most detailed available map of Trump's job approval rating. Powered by over 12,000 interviews for our Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. I hope this generates many stories, and hours wasted exploring data! www.gelliottmorris.com/p/a-very-det...

Female scientists have to wait longer for their articles to be reviewed than their male colleagues. An analysis of 36.5 million papers in the life sciences shows that for females it took 115 days to reach a decision, compared to 101 days for men journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @plosbiology.org

Change in Headline

Very, very sad news. A brilliant writer and thinker and generally the most interesting person in the room.

He said it to an international audience, and also said "and Japanese", so it's not quite as boneheaded as implied... What's interesting the Anglophone assumption (expressed in many contexts) that everyone speaking English is somehow inherently better than all speaking another language