Tag: linguistics

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Gael Spivak

Running Out of Words: It’s Not a Slippery Slope

January 19, 2021 by Gael Spivak | 6 Comments on Running Out of Words: It’s Not a Slippery Slope

It’s almost inevitable. People who say “we’ve gotten too PC” about language will, at some point in the discussion, claim that if we stop using certain words or phrases, we’ll run out of words to write and talk. Arriving at this spot Who is having these discussions and how does this line of thinking work? […]

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Barbara McClintock

Emergency Linguistics: The Translation of Public Health Information in Emergency Situations

August 4, 2020 by Barbara McClintock | 4 Comments on Emergency Linguistics: The Translation of Public Health Information in Emergency Situations

Every act of communication is an act of translation. Gregory Rabassa, translator of Spanish and Portuguese fiction The translation of public health information is critical in emergency situations, particularly in a country like Canada that welcomes thousands of immigrants every year whose mother tongue is not English or French. A new discipline has been proposed, […]

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Barbara McClintock

Survey of Canadianisms

December 10, 2019 by Barbara McClintock | Leave a Comment

These days, language professionals in Canada are starting to turn to the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or other reference books to replace the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which is now 15 years old and not likely to be re-edited. An interesting initiative has been started at the University of Toronto by Sali Tagliamonte, professor and […]

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Frances Peck

Vocation, Avocation: Margery Fee and Canadian Usage

July 9, 2019 by Frances Peck | 6 Comments on Vocation, Avocation: Margery Fee and Canadian Usage

We editors have our own celebrities. At the March meeting of Editors BC, which featured Stefan Dollinger, editor-in-chief of the DCHP-2 (A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition), a name on the guest list caught my eye. Could it be? Really? It was. In the audience was Margery Fee, associate editor of the […]

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James Harbeck

Novel Medical Treatments

June 4, 2019 by James Harbeck | 4 Comments on Novel Medical Treatments

People with serious health problems are often subject to novel treatments. But that shouldn’t mean being treated like they’re in a novel. Health problems are human problems, and they can be important stories about real things affecting real people. But often, in telling them, we create another problem, because we make the story conform to […]

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James Harbeck

The Roots of Disagreement

July 17, 2018 by James Harbeck | 1 Comment on The Roots of Disagreement

It was one of those crises that end up in the parentheses of memoranda; it concerned the geneses of several referenda among alumni (and alumnæ) about addenda to their indices: the criteria for the termini of Greek- and Latin-derived words. By what formulæ should we choose, for instance, schemata or schemas? The competing sides saw […]

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James Harbeck

Do you want to use a Germanic feature, or do you prefer using a Celtic one?

April 10, 2018 by James Harbeck | 1 Comment on Do you want to use a Germanic feature, or do you prefer using a Celtic one?

Learning other languages is fun. And to learn another language is to learn more about your own language — especially when it takes on the aspect of learning more about your family tree. You’ve probably had the experience of meeting new relatives or learning about ancestors and thinking, “Oh, that explains something.” Well, consider this: […]

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James Harbeck

A Macaronic Feather in Our Cap

December 12, 2017 by James Harbeck | 2 Comments on A Macaronic Feather in Our Cap

English is gloriously macaronic. I don’t mean that it’s like a big bowl of elbow noodles, not exactly. But I also don’t mean that it’s like a macaron — well, maybe I do, but that’s not what the word means. Macaronic, linguistically, refers to something that’s a mixture of languages. Macaronic poetry, for instance, may […]

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Zanne Cameron

Being Intercultural: The Language of Health

August 30, 2016 by Zanne Cameron | 3 Comments on Being Intercultural: The Language of Health

Being intercultural is often defined strictly in terms of ethnicity and geography, when really each of us lives a multiplicity of cultural identities on a daily basis. Our interactions at work and with family and friends, our activities, faith, offline and online personas, all have their own overlapping and intersecting sets of beliefs, values and […]

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James Harbeck

More Honoured in the Breach or the Observance?

March 1, 2016 by James Harbeck | Leave a Comment

It is tempting to say that getting classical quotations right is more honoured in the breach than the observance. But if we did, we’d be guilty too. In the original, Hamlet is telling Horatio about the tradition of drinking sprees in the Danish court; he says it makes Danes look bad to other nations. So […]

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James Harbeck

Plough Through Enough Dough to Make You Cough or Hiccough | Linguistics, Frankly

June 9, 2015 by James Harbeck | 2 Comments on Plough Through Enough Dough to Make You Cough or Hiccough | Linguistics, Frankly

You want some tough spelling for an English learner to plough through? Head to ough. There are six different ways it can be said at the end of a word, as in plough, through, dough, enough, cough and (for those who spell it that way) hiccough. (Never mind the versions with another letter after it!) […]

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James Harbeck

Whom Do You Believe? | Linguistics, Frankly

January 20, 2015 by James Harbeck | 2 Comments on Whom Do You Believe? | Linguistics, Frankly

First of all: If you can avoid using whom, you should. Any but the most formal texts are better off without it; it’s a foreign word for most users, as evidenced by the general inability of even many language professionals to use it quite correctly all the time. Sometimes, however, you have to use it. […]

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James Harbeck

What’s English? | Linguistics, Frankly

November 12, 2014 by James Harbeck | 1 Comment on What’s English? | Linguistics, Frankly

Here’s a quick quiz. Tell me which of the following are English and which aren’t. For each one, say why it is or isn’t English and, if it’s not, what language it is. There’s no place to plug your car in in the parkade. A wha dat dey dem people deh nyam ih smell sweet. […]

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James Harbeck

Seriously, What’s the Problem With Sentence Adverbs? | Linguistics, Frankly

September 9, 2014 by James Harbeck | Leave a Comment

The English language is a very complex and powerful thing, capable of many nuances and quite resistant to simplistic attempts at tidying it up. Sadly, not everyone realizes that. Worse still, many people take very narrow and inconsistent views, focusing on pet peeves while letting parallel instances of usage pass unnoticed. It’s as though a […]

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Frances Peck

Notes From Away: Cape Breton English

August 5, 2014 by Frances Peck | 14 Comments on Notes From Away: Cape Breton English

My first job, selling sundries the summer I was 12 to the cottagers and campers who flocked to Cape Breton’s fabled Mira River, was about as far from the language business as you can get. Yet a few days in, I learned a humbling linguistic lesson. Three times the customer bellowed his order across the […]

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James Harbeck

There’s No Way to Truly Split an Infinitive | Linguistics, Frankly

June 17, 2014 by James Harbeck | Leave a Comment

You can’t split an infinitive. I don’t mean I don’t want you to. I don’t mean it’s not proper to. I mean it’s not possible to. This is for the same reason that I haven’t just broken one off three times, at the ends of the three preceding sentences. The English infinitive is one word. […]

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James Harbeck

I Only Wanted to Explain This | Linguistics, Frankly

April 15, 2014 by James Harbeck | 4 Comments on I Only Wanted to Explain This | Linguistics, Frankly

Adverbs are a problematic and much-maligned class of words. Linguists often have trouble explaining exactly why they go where they go. Some sorts of adverbs are baselessly despised (hopefully, people will eventually get over those hangups, but I’m not hopeful). Some people think adverbs should be excised from writing altogether. I’d like to cover all […]

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