If anything, an understatement. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

ICYMI: with the help of my son's amazing cello teacher, Petronella Torin, and the extraordinary journalist @patricox.bsky.social, we recreated the music of Olga Janáčková's last words, which her father had described in her final days. subtitlepod.com/how-composer...

“‘Keeping’ and not ‘losing’ my Irish is probably the greatest gift I have given myself.”

When you register your name in the Icelandic phonebook you can choose to state your profession. And they have a pretty loose definition of what exactly a profession entails. This person for example has opted for „þjóðhetja“. It means „National Hero“.

this is so sad if true. if nothing else it educated me about North Korea's draconian language policies www.dailynk.com/english/nort...

In which Orwell vigorously “responds” to Grammarly’s suggestions to “stay on-brand” and write “with A.I. prompts.”

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

The answer is no. But read the article, it’s good history. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Y'all! I am so happy you can hear this. It's one of the most amazing things I discovered while researching Bye Bye I Love You (and again thanks to @martenvandermeulen.bsky.social) and was so so moved by cellist Petronella Torin's recreation. A big appreciation for @patricox.bsky.social as well.

Studies with results like these can be bunk, but this one is legit—which makes it super interesting. www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

I firmly believe in not judging people's language use – because it's the right thing to do, yes, but also because I could never achieve the levels of saltiness of the 16th-century Flemish scholar Jacob de Meyere, who called French the 'scum of Latin'.

Breaking news: The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage — a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China www.ft.com/content/20d0...

Essential reading, now also essential listening.

Been working a long time on this one. Thanks to @niemanfoundation.bsky.social for granting me the time and space to finally start to understand why US broadcasting (and stepchild podcasting) is so weird! continuous-wave.beehiiv.com/p/no-self-wi...

Such a terrible idea I thought it was an early April Fools story.

Irish English words added to the OED in its latest update: blaa, class, debs, ludraman, act the maggot, mineral, morto, spice bag www.oed.com/discover/new...

Nice to share the name with yer man.

I wrote an entire book on alphabetical order,* and a) this never occurred to me; and b) holy shit that's crazy. *It's called A Place for Everything, since you ask, available in all good bookshops now.

This evening is the first public event for Bye Bye I Love You: a talk at Planet Word, the language museum in Washington, DC. I'm excited to be onstage with Britt Oates, an anthropologist and manager of public programs at PW, who GETS IT. planetwordmuseum.org/events/book-...

My Danish pals have written their own fork in the road email. denmarkification.com

A sense of longing for that time between the wars when OK, the economy was shot and the newer politicians were creepy but we all put on too much makeup and danced till dawn to atonal music. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/con...

Ukraine is the birthplace of the Hasidic Jewish movement and has deep roots in Jewish history stretching back more than a thousand years. Yet until recently, crucial sacred texts — including the Torah — have never been translated into Ukrainian.

Shame no more. This is Ireland’s top bilingual podcast. m.independent.ie/entertainmen...

"Correct" grammar was weird and not especially correct in 1913. Just like now. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Bob Dylan is unpredictable but I don’t think he is going to, um, update this line: ‘Key West is the place to go / Down by the Gulf of Mexico.’ youtu.be/G-oOCo1Y1bw?...

‘In the US, the language of migration tends toward the hydraulic: surge, wave, pressure, influx. These terms cast human movement as a physical force rather than the outcome of decisions made across decades.’ Pooja Bhatia on Haitian refugees, from April: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Today on @literaryhub.bsky.social, my passage in AMERICAN OASIS about Ofelia Zepeda's legacy of preserving and teaching the O'odham language in Tucson and southern Arizona lithub.com/were-not-liv...

Judge caught in a 1970s time warp calls a football fan’s racist slur ‘banter.’

A friend of mine took this photo yesterday

Keep reading.

"Just doing journalism" *includes* fact-checking, it's not an either-or.

Daughter taking her first college #linguistics class today. Not her major but I'm super-duper proud.

If you think Scandinavians are all the same, get ready to have your mind blown. Swedes and Finns deploy opposite approaches in their tolerance of silence.

The Separated by a Common Language 2024 US-to-UK Word of the year is: LANDSLIDE It was the Labour win that decided it, but literal use of the word is up too. separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2024/12/us-t...

Everybody remember to go get you a library card to help keep them funded

Language journalism has never been considered a separate thing in the minds of editors and publishers, and only through the efforts of people like @patricox.bsky.social to self-identify. But language isn’t a general assignment topic, like the weather or current events.

For a rewarding read, a pan always beats a rave.

A small but curious thing is how so many major political figures have distinctive first names. If you hear any of these without context… Donald, Mitch, Elon, Jared, Melania, Kamala, Keir, Boris, Kemi, Nigel … I reckon your brain immediately goes to these people?

Someday in the not-so-far-future this headline is going to be used as an example in a linguistics class about how language changes can be so considerable that we no longer recognize the meaning of a sentence.

Stabbed to death for not speaking English. www.amny.com/new-york/man...

It’s a confidence trick just getting up in the morning at this moment in human history.

The former colonies are exchanging notes. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

LIFE HACK: Answer your phone "Hello you're on the air" and 99% of the time people will just hang up.

So good to read @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social deliver an epic and much-deserved takedown here.

People are often surprised when I tell them this: both Twitter and Facebook/insta/threads are now specifically engineered to downgrade, hide, suppress real journalism. If this platform is different, that's a huge change

1. Flew nonstop from coast to coast. (Not proud.) 2. Now at a conference of people who love to read, write and cordially discuss their disagreements. #sblaar 3. Photo is mainly blue. A Bluesky trifecta?

PS: Subtitle has a newsletter! Get some languagey news and fun tidbits delivered to your inbox every 2-3 weeks. mailchi.mp/fbeb6300f27d...

Well, this is convenient. In Finnish, kakisto is literally a collective derivative from the word kakka ’shit’. Kak-isto Shit-collective We have a lot of these derivatives with trees: kuusi ’spruce’ > kuusisto ’set of spruces’ etc. #linguistics #Finnish

Someone at the BBC thinks South Korea is in southeast Asia. Must be those World Service cuts.