It’s time to play Biblical Crux once again! (Cf. Daughter of Greed, from 2019.) I’m reading Mikhail Shishkin’s 2010 Письмовник (‘Letter-writing manual,’ translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark) despite the concerns about Shishkin’s novels I expressed here, and so far I’m enjoying it (though already there’s a worrying amount of “Oh […]| languagehat.com
Ashifa Kassam reports for the Guardian on some research that falls very much in the remit of this blog: When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely. While native English speakers in […]| languagehat.com
Frequent commenter cuchuflete writes: There is an expression heard with some frequency in these parts, “little by slowly”. When I first heard it a quarter century back, it was disconcerting to my Midwestern/Middle Atlantic ears. It, or more aptly I, have now become naturalized and it is ‘normal’ to my ears. Same goes for my […]| languagehat.com
I was reading a story by Carolyn Brown in our local paper (how could I resist the title “History told through hats”?) that began: In the 1870s, the largest palm leaf hat factory in the world, which produced hundreds of thousands of hats each year, was based in Amherst. A new history exhibit is celebrating […]| languagehat.com
Erin Maglaque, last seen here in 2023 discussing Aldus Manutius, reviews several books on the Renaissance — Nine Hundred Conclusions by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver), The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language by Edward Wilson-Lee, and Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a […]| languagehat.com
Bianca Giacobone and Guido G. Beduschi report on an intriguing acquisition: In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as […]| languagehat.com
Another intriguing Facebook post by Nelson Goering (I’ve added itals where appropriate): Einar Haugen has this to say about the fate of ð/d in later Scandinavian: “In all Sc except Ic it normally disappeared after vowels, e.g. CSc veþr weather > veðr > NW vær/Sw dial vär… In Da Sw NN DN it was later […]| languagehat.com
A University of Copenhagen press release reports on what could be an exciting discovery: Christophe Helmke and Magnus Pharao Hansen have taken the first steps toward solving a major archaeological mystery surrounding the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan. Until now, the language of Teotihuacan has been unknown. […] By analyzing the signs on Teotihuacan’s colorful […]| languagehat.com
I had occasion (I think because of the bizarre Finnish video I linked to here) to investigate the Finnish word koti ‘home,’ which led me back through successive etymological retreats to Proto-Uralic *kota, where I found the following Wortgeschichte: Probably akin to Proto-Iranian *kátah (compare Avestan 𐬐𐬀𐬙𐬀 (kata, “house/home, pit”), Persian کده (kade, “house”)), in […]| languagehat.com
I was reading Jennifer Wilson’s NYkr puff piece on former prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin (archived) and was rewarded with a few morsels of Finnish, for example the phrase at the end of this passage: A few months later, Marin shocked foes and supporters alike by resigning from Parliament. It turned out that living […]| languagehat.com
Michael Marcus has an extraordinarily interesting Medium post on Borges and his translators; after some introductory paragraphs about Borges himself and disagreements over the different translations of his stories, he points out that “Borges himself was fluent in English, and was prolific in translating English works into Spanish” and asks: “Why didn’t he translate his […]| languagehat.com
I was considering the word mall, thinking vaguely that it had something to do with Pall Mall, and when I investigated I found such an interesting mess I thought I’d share it. The OED’s entry (revised 2000) starts with “Senses deriving from the place where pall-mall was played” (c1660 “The Mall [at Tours], which is […]| languagehat.com
David Wright Faladé’s “Amarillo Boulevard” (New Yorker, September 28, 2025; archived) is the best short story I’ve read in a while, dealing with family, race, friendship, Texas, and other large matters with no apparent effort and packing a surprising emotional punch. What leads me to post it is a phrase I had to look up, […]| languagehat.com
I’m only on the first chapter of Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919, which I can already tell is going to be endlessly informative and thought-provoking (thanks, NWU Press!), and the section “Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy Weigh the Two Cultures” is so interesting I thought I’d quote some chunks of it: While incarcerated […]| languagehat.com
I just watched the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which effectively intertwines jazz music and musicians (Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and many others) with the tragic history of the Congo in 1960, culminating in the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, one of my early memories as an assiduous reader […]| languagehat.com
Tessa Hadley is not only one of my favorite living writers (see this anniversary post) but a source of interesting words (e.g., gabardine). My wife and I are currently reading Free Love, and when we got to “She stripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls white, ripped up the foul old carpet and bought […]| languagehat.com
Adam Thirlwell has an LRB review (archived) of “Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas,” and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Stein — it makes me want to go back to an author I read and enjoyed decades ago but haven’t looked at much since. I’ll excerpt a section […]| languagehat.com
I have no idea what this site is about other than being a showcase for texts in apparently invented languages; this recent post, for example, begins: Aża cīfir zuoj Thorenur khioj thurenur, řa duiker. Siřover taekar ofo, ici se laima şiekhar ifi koiden, siekar, beifir ata zirenur roidir, vu go ifi sibe. Eçe aba diamur […]| languagehat.com
Ben Yagoda is an old LH favorite (e.g., 2015, 2022), so I was delighted to see that last week’s New Yorker included an essay of his (archived) on H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It starts: In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor […]| languagehat.com
Victor Mair’s Language Log post starts off with Japanese 奴隷 dorei ‘slave,’ of which Mair says “Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n-” (in Mandarin it’s núlì) and continues “So I started to ask around how is it that Japanese has a d- initial […]| languagehat.com
Seamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived), and I find myself enchanted — Ellmann’s book may have been the first literary biography I ever read, and just picking the hefty volume off my shelf makes me want to reread both it and Joyce. Perry begins:| languagehat.com
maraow| languagehat.com
Hitch.| languagehat.com
Some items I’ve run across lately:| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
Archives| languagehat.com
My wife and I always enjoy Bill Danielson’s weekly nature columns in our local paper, the Hampshire Gazette; he usually writes about birds, but this week it was an oddly specialized topic and an unusual word I didn’t remember encountering before:| languagehat.com
Mandarin with Taiwanese Characteristics.| languagehat.com
jack morava| languagehat.com