David Crystal. Linguisten.de. DexterousTongue. Humans Who Read Grammars. All Things Linguistic. BBC Radio 4 - Radio 4 in Four - Totally awesome: Seven ways you use Americanisms every day. Voicings about language by an American linguist in Edinburgh. Stephantics. Superlinguo. Lexicon Valley. This essay is adapted from the Pessimists Archive podcast, a show about technology and the history of unfounded fears.
Subscribe on iTunes, or listen to the full audio version. Why Donald Trump won will be debated for generations, but we can all agree on one thing: Nostalgia is powerful. Just consider the elegance of “again” in “Make America Great Again.” It says that today’s changes ruined a glorious yesterday—that a golden age is ours to reclaim. “People want to believe that they are part of the greatest nation, that redemption is around the corner, that a perfect nation in which no suffering happens is possible,” says Alan Levinovitz, an assistant professor of religion at James Madison University.
But nostalgia narratives contain a fatal flaw: They harken back to real times. I started making calls. First, today. But did the people of post-war America believe they were living in a golden age? McAdam says that many people in post-war America pointed to the ’20s as a better time. Strong Language. Linguistics jobs series. Language Log. An important rallying cry and usage distinction made by allies of undocumented workers in the current cultural battle over immigration in the United States is Elie Wiesel's assertion above: "No human being is illegal.
" In the quote, Wiesel gives examples of the kinds of adjectives that he feels can denote properties of people (fat, skinny, beautiful, right, and wrong). On the other hand, calling a person 'illegal', he says, is a contradiction in terms. Here's a more elaborated statement of the idea, quoted from this website When one refers to an immigrant as an "illegal alien," they are using the term as a noun. They are effectively saying that the individual, as opposed to any actions that the individual has taken, is illegal.
What are the linguistic underpinnings of the intuition that using the term illegal alien implies that a person's existence is illegal? Read the rest of this entry » Wug Life. Rachael Tatman has an interesting post weighing the pros and cons of doing a PhD in linguistics.
She comes down on the “no” side, because the academic job market is terrible and “grad school is grueling”: You have to have very strong personal motivation to finish a PhD. Sure, your committee is there to provide oversight and you have drop-dead due dates. But those deadlines are often very far away and, depending on your committee, you may have a lot of independence. That means motivating yourself to work steadily while manage several ongoing projects in parallel (you’re publishing papers in addition to writing your dissertation, right?) Another blog post, by Tal Linzen, answers yes: There’s also been some discussion on twitter where linguists again disagree with each other, so I’d suggest reading those to hear from even more people.
Language Village.