Archive for the ‘Spelling’ Category

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Brew-ha-ha

April 26, 2016

Two separate reports from roughly the same time, both with people using the spelling brew-ha-ha for brouhaha. From Jon Lighter to ADS-L on the 21st:

The CNN crawl quotes one of the indicted Michigan officials [in the Flint drinking water crisis] as describing the criminal charges against him as one more of “those brew ha has” that develop now and then.

And then the NYT (and other papers, of course) quoted sports commentator and former Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling’s use of “brew ha ha” in discussions of the use of bathrooms by transgender people, first in Facebook and then on his personal blog.

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Posted in Eggcorns, Spelling | 1 Comment »

Briefly: more -ible -able

April 10, 2016

Over on ADS-L, a discussion of distract{i/a}bility, by squirrels and by people with ADHD, but there’s the spelling thing, which I happen to have looked at for collectible / collectable just a couple of days back. But every pair has its own story.

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Posted in Derivation, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

-ible -able

April 8, 2016

Wilson Gray, posting on ADS-L on the 4th, boldfacing added:

In the on-line catalog is pictured a CD whose title clearly reads:

Rare, Collectable & Soulful

Nevertheless, the catalog captions the picture as:

Rare, Collectible & Soulful

Not just one CD, but a whole series under that title. Here’s the cover for volume 2:

The catalog writers apparently “corrected” what they saw as a “spelling error” on the part of the record company — opting for WF (well-formedness, according to the writers’ lights) over Faith (faithfulness to the source). (There’s a Page on this blog listing postings about Faith vs. WF.) The facts are complex, but what’s undeniable is that most modern dictionaries recognize both collectible and collectable as acceptable spellings, with collectable having the edge for a specialized sense; from Wikipedia:

A collectable (collectible or collector’s item) is any object regarded as being of value or interest to a collector (not necessarily monetarily valuable or antique).

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Posted in Faith vs. WF, Spelling | 1 Comment »

Briefly: English spelling and its weirdness

February 14, 2016

Paul Armstrongb points me to this entertaining Mental Floss video about English spelling and how it developed. Fascinating, academically sound, and engaging presentation. Text by Arika Okrent, drawings in real time by Sean ONeill.

It’s from almost a year ago, but doesn’t seem to have been noted on Language Log or this blog, though Okrent appears in both places pretty often. And last year she was given the Linguistics Journalism Award by the Linguistic Society of America (an event reported on both LLog and here).

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Ten language-y comics

September 13, 2015

On the Comics Kingdom blog on Tuesday the 8th: “Tuesdays Top Ten Comics on Grammar and Wordplay” (with grammar, as usual, understood broadly). CK distributes strips from King Features; it’s one of my regular sources of cartoons for this blog. The strips here are all from 2014-15.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Coordination, Dialects, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Punctuation, Slang, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

Two from xkcd

September 4, 2015

Two recent cartoons from xkcd: #1571 of 8/31, “Car Model Names”; and #1572 of 9/2, “xkcd Survey”, with one question about spelling (“What word can you never seem to spell on the first try?”) and one about words you know (“Which of these words do you know the meaning of?”):

(#1)

(#2)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

“a fun roof in Gent”

August 1, 2015

So went the message from my colleague Elizabeth Traugott on the 25th, to accompany this wonderful photo:

(This was before Elizabeth went on to Antwerp for the activities of the International Pragmatics Conference; posting here.)

Elizabeth has not yet identified the building for me, but what caught my eye, beyond the roof, was the spelling of the city’s name, GENT (rather than the spelling in English, GHENT). Things are linguistically complicated in Belgium.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Languages, Names, Spelling | 5 Comments »

Dave Blazek

July 26, 2015

Another cartoonist new to this blog (like Ken Krimstein, recently posted on). The Loose Change cartoon by Blazek below (from 2010) came to me from the Grammarly Facebook page via a friend:

(#1)

Pin the Apostrophe on the Word.

There’s a rich vein of cartoons mocking English teachers for their purported inclination to focus on minutiae.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Spelling, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

Ken Krimstein

July 25, 2015

… the cartoonist, with this cartoon in the July 27th New Yorker:

(#1)

The P is silent.

I’m charmed by the idea of pterodactyl commuters on the Hudson

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Posted in Language and religion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

Diacritic midges

June 13, 2015

Today’s One Big Happy:

Those itty-bitty dots are a diaeresis, a diacritic that has largely disappeared from use in English-language materials, except (famously) in The New Yorker.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

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