Words That, Taken Together Possibly Mean Something

The scholarly journal called Social Text has again published a paper that may seem to be a jumble of big words but may, conceivably be full of deep, clear, important meaning. The new study is: “S’More Inequality — The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education,” Bethany Moreton [pictured here], Social Text, 2014, Volume 32, Number 3 […]

“Willy-Nilly” (the evolution of)

The Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996) featured one of the very few scholarly investigations into the origin(s) of the expression “Willy-Nilly” Author Paula Kadose Radetzky (University of California, Berkeley) notes that although “Willy-Nilly” originally meant ‘unwillingly’, […]

Improbable Research