It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who said this last night (3/4/19): “He was being dangled a pardon.” The sense, of course, was that a (Continue Reading)
It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who said this last night (3/4/19): “He was being dangled a pardon.” The sense, of course, was that a (Continue Reading)
When a word retains an older meaning along with a newer one, the resulting coincidence can be confusing. When on of the meanings is actually (Continue Reading)
The subjunctive, rightly called a mood in the grammatical sense, gets its name from the fact that it ordinarily does not stand alone (though it (Continue Reading)
Some where at some time a article on pedagogical issues in French was illicitly copied by me. It had appeared in The Modern Language Journal (Continue Reading)
Quoting a NYT article: And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an (Continue Reading)
My friend has been gone for over a month now; he’s in India. I hope he’s back. We meet Tuesdays and today is Sunday so (Continue Reading)
Here’s an example of someone who is very accomplished and articulate with a high school education but whose control of standard verb forms is erratic, (Continue Reading)
I did not write down the source of this but I’m guessing it was a live person I was listening to. The juxtaposition of two (Continue Reading)
Some grammatical features seem very detailed, yet, if violated, can cause some interference just by their strangeness. Most of us want our interlocutors to focus (Continue Reading)
In French there are two ways of indicating possession, one with the preposition ‘de’ and another with the preposition ‘a’. So one can say the (Continue Reading)
In French there is a feature called liaison whereby the final consonant of only certain words and word combinations attach themselves to the following word (Continue Reading)
I’ve been reviewing participles and their uses in Urdu by rereading Barker’s little essay on them. It is really quite a bit of material to (Continue Reading)
The title of a video of Bafut music recorded in Nigeria, the Delta. It reflects what can happen when a language is transmitted incompletely as, (Continue Reading)
ichard Engle’s interview of Veselnitskaya contained a crucial item where she labeled her relationship with the Russian prokurator’s office. She called herself an ‘informant’ and (Continue Reading)
My intention is to introduce a series of entries here regarding the basics of fl teaching with a checklist of typical notions held by (Continue Reading)
The normal way to give the equivalent of French chez = at the place of, home of, business of, etc. (from Latin casa) in Black (Continue Reading)
The widow of the slain Green Berets soldier, LaDavid Johnson (there, I did better than Trump) gave an example of deep Black English when she (Continue Reading)
When we find that English ‘like’ used to work like Spanish ‘gustar’, i.e. to say ‘The king likes the queen’ in Old English, we’d have (Continue Reading)
C-Span had McWhorter discussing his book, Back Talk, Black Talk. In his talk he laid out, in his usual fashion, the structure of discourse on (Continue Reading)
One of my favorite examples of how borrowed words get the grammatical treatment of the receiving language (more than one sputnik is sputniks < Eng. (Continue Reading)
I responded to the question (embedded in the response) with trepidation b/c this series of blogs on WordPress rates responses and kicks you off and (Continue Reading)
Literally how many times have we heard someone say “literally” when they mean no such thing? I heard Trump say something the other day like that (Continue Reading)
From David Lightfoot’s The Development of Language, pp. 137-8: he states that cases derive from serial verbs reanalyzed as adpositions, then as case endings. This (Continue Reading)