A French / US research team, who analysed the outcomes of more than 4 million court cases, found that, if you’re a defendant : Having a decision on one’s birthday reduces the sentence by 4 days out of an average total sentence length of 127 days If you’re wondering why a defendant may get more […]
So … in this era when so many people use the word “so” to begin so many of their sentences, one scholar has written three studies analysing what happens when people begin their sentences with the word. Galina Bolden’s first “so” study, in 2006, explains that sometimes people use the word as a way of […]
Students describe their thesis topic, in one sentence. The LoL My Thesis web site presents lots of these single-sentence summaries. Here are a few [each with the person’s field-of-study and institution]: This is a weird star cluster and we absolutely have no idea how it formed – sorry. [Astrophysics, Whitman College] A kiwi egg, despite […]
“Geoffrey Sampson defends the extraordinary claim that there is no theoretically significant non-quantitative linguistic difference between a sentence of English and a string composed of the same words in the opposite order. Let me put that a different way. Order opposite the in words same the of composed string a and English of sentence a […]
Lead Sentence of the Week honors go to Alister Doyle of Reuters, whose news report begins: Indigenous Sami peoples in the Arctic may have found a way to help their reindeer herds cope with climate change: more castration. (Thanks to investigator John Karp for bringing this to our attention.) Further detail appears in a pair […]
Is this the record-holder for most-words-in-a-single-sentence written by a judge in a court document? Written by Senior Judge Thomas J. Aquilino of the US Court of International Trade in a statement handed down on March 31, 2010, the sentence is approximately 540 words long. Here it is: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal […]