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’, […]
Tag: words
The most Curious Work ever Published?
As far back as 1882, the publishers of ‘The Sydney Slang Dictionary’ (which listed such phrases) insisted that it was “By far the most Curious Work ever Published.” The question of whether it actually was or not, and/or whether even curiouser publications might have appeared since then, remains highly debatable. Either way, an article in […]
Oblique Linguistic Enigmas: deciphering “NOT/NOT”
Languages, it is said, are never static – words, their meaning, their pronunciation and preferred syntax are constantly evolving. But the changes are not restricted to words – punctuation marks too, evolve. Take, for a recent example, an unusual construct from an official US Govt. source – reprinted by the UK Guardian as part of […]
“Topical Trends in a Corpus of Persuasive Writing”
If you list everything that’s topical, trendy and persuasive, your list might include things you’d prefer it not to include, suggests this study: “Topical Trends in a Corpus of Persuasive Writing,” Michael Heilman and Nitin Madnani [pictured here], Research Report ETS RR-12-19, October 2012. The authors write, topically and perhaps persuasively: “Many writing assessments use generic […]
Review of several studies of ‘Yawp’ in China
‘Yawp’ is a widespread problem in China. • Causing problems in fuel cells – see: Using of the wavelet theory in wiping off the yawp from the fuel cell signals • negatively impacting power plants – see: Control Technology and Example on Yawp in Thermo Power Plants • provoking uncertainty in microwave standards – see: […]
Shakespearian delicious butchery terms
The Shakespeare’s England blog has a list of cooking/butchery words and phrases that involve certain animals. The list includes the following (and many others); I stumbled upon these rather charming 17th Century cooking terms today. To Carve is to Cut up a Dish of Meat, but according to the Meats, use these Terms for their […]
Much ado ablaut flim flam
Flim flam gets a wordy going over from Professor Steen Schousboe, of the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His article, entitled “Linguistic flim-flam?” gets down to the nitty gritty of linguistic ‘Reduplication’ – and it’s pell mell chock a block with super duper, hunky dory reduplicative chit chat. There’s […]
Wordplay proves a fruitful area for research
Words, words, words are the bread, butter, salt, pepper, meat and potatoes of a small, US-based magazine called Word Ways that has been coming out four times a year since 1968. Dmitri Borgmann, the founding editor, described it as “the journal of recreational linguistics”. Its essence, in a word: wordplay. Borgmann’s obituary, in a 1985 issue of Word […]
Ni phrases (It’s not just knights who say…)
If you thought that a ‘Ni phrase’ was simply an example of finely crafted absurdity from the creators of Monty Python – think again. For linguists, Ni-phrases literally span the globe – performing important functions not only in Japanese and Hindi, but also in Russian. Example publication : Ni-Phrases by Klaus Abels (Journal of Slavic […]
The Zwickys – looking at words
Arnold M. Zwicky is Consulting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Ohio State University. The professor investigates “the interrelationships of syntax, morphology, and phonology, focusing especially on apparent counterexamples to the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax and the Principle of Morphology-Free Syntax, as well as phenomena (like clitics) that appear […]