Definitions change. No problem.

Meaning is about ideas; it’s not about any specific, pronounceable lists of English letters.

Our lexicon isn’t sacred.

Should an inability to spell… mark a person as being uneducated? Or is the ability to spell a trivial accomplishment after all?

-Ronald Wardhaugh, Proper English, 13

I don’t see much constructive value in the word “heresy” anymore.

Pejoration has overtaken its older, more technical definition:

What say ye?

We’d have no access to God if we couldn’t talk about him as if he were more like us than he is.

He did recordings in 1995 and 1975. This is from the latter.

Does that mean latter chronologically or latter in the sentence?

I recommend watching Fry and Laurie’s discussion of the “flexibility of language” and whether English is “capable of sustaining demagoguery.”

True linguistics!

Our stewardess asked those by the emergency exits for “verbal assent” that they could handle it.

Would writing “yes” have been acceptable?

[I object] to the way people treat English grammar as if it were a frozen collection of eternal truths like Pythagorean geometry.

-Geoffrey Pullum, Far from the Madding Gerund, 45

If I feel the need to point out to someone that I’m being respectful to them, it’s pretty good evidence I’m not.

If I say “chikar mikoni,” that’s Farsi. If I say, “What are you doing?” that’s English.

English is English. Farsi is Farsi

Liberman on “correct grammar”:

Many people believe that stipulation of shared linguistic norms is essential to communication…. [T]his idea is transparent nonsense.

Orison: It’s consterant.
Me: “Consterant”?
Orison: That’s when things’re neat.

Have your kids invented any words that are now in your vocabulary?

Orison: What are knots?

Me: Strings that are tied up.

Orison, holding a shoestring: Here’s another knot.

Me: Nope, that’s an aglet.

Matt: Mike, does “ping-pong” mean anything in Mandarin?

Mike: Um…no…well, actually, yes…it could be translated, “flat-fat.”

(Ping-pong’s real etymology.)

Update: Be sure to read the comments. They’re way more interesting than the post.

On the way to a tryst, two hearts should be going pitter-patter with romantic desire and excitement … no thousand bucks changes hands.

I found this pleasingly sesquipedalian list of 22 words that are fun to say:

1. Onomatopoeia
2. Cacology
3. Nuance
4. Undulate
5. Symposium
6. Loquacious
7. Facetious
8. Phlebotomist
9. Superfluous
10. Trabajabamos
11. Nefarious
12. Abominable
13. Discombobulate
14. Disingenuous
15. Lackadaisical
16. Archipelago
17. Guacamole
18. Avocado
19. Oblivion
20. Usurp
21. Plethora
22. Shank

I think I’d add “gerbil.”

Have any favorites?

Practicing economy of language means axing wordy phrases like “in the vicinity of” and “at the present time” and . . . “economy of language.”

I often hear the construction, “The thing is, is that…” But tonight was the first time I heard, “Here’s the thing is…”

It probably means I’m too strict if my 3-year-old tells me, “While I’m going potty, I need you to give me mercy.”