Category: linguistics

  • Prof. Mark Davies’ ouster at BYU

    Mark Davies was a professor of linguistics at BYU who created tools for analyzing large collections of text, a method known as corpus analysis. He ran a website, corpus.byu.edu, where these text collections were available for anyone to use. The site, now at english-corpora.org, and Dr. Davies’ website, describe a process of administrator mismanagement that…

  • ‘they’ is not a drop-in replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but we could use one

    Singular usage of ‘they’ is well-established in English, going back centuries. Depending on your exposure to it, you may yourself use it regularly, as I happily do. It’s great having a single word that can refer to individuals whose gender is unclear or unspecified. However, gender-neutral ‘they’ and its friends ‘them’, ‘their’, and ‘theirs’, do…

  • Obamanymy

    One of the great things about the impending presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is that his name is awesome. I guess that’s what you get when your last name begins with an open syllable (meaning that it starts with a vowel). I predict that a whole new subfield of onomastics dedicated to the study of…