phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

C’mon, you know you’ve been waiting for this opportunity to come knocking … now’s your chance!

(Interested candidates may want to pick up a copy of Stephen Anderson’s latest book.)

Last night Jon Stewart cracked a Cheney-heart-condition-joke with “defibulators” as the punch line. Now I’m not one to judge, but I had to point it out. Despite the 29K ghits that “defibulator” gets, and the 12K ghits that “defibulators” gets, Google still asks you if you mean “defibrillator(s)”. Oxford lists defibrillator under defibrillation.

There’s a parallel here with vascillations like nuclear/nucular and parap[a]legic, discussed a while back by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log and Eric Bakovic on phonoloblog. (more…)

I was going to post this as a comment on Lisa’s last post, but this turned out to be waaay too long for a comment.

A number of things jump to mind as I read an reread the NYO article discussed here and by Mark and Ben on Language Log.  (more…)

The New York Observer, a small paper in New York City, has an article today on the “City Girl Squawk“. The particular dialect features they’re discussing don’t come across very well in the article, but at least they played clips when getting quotes from the prominent linguists they interviewed: Bert Vaux, John Singler, Bill Labov, and Walt Wolfram.

At NYU, we sometimes get requests from the media to talk about different aspects of linguistics (e.g. why some names, like “Bennifer” or “Brangelina”, make good blends.) Since these requests have come from New York Newsday or even from Fox News, I think sometimes we’re wary about being portrayed negatively or in a “gee whiz, look at that stuff they study!” kind of way. But this article does a good job of using experts to shed light on a pop culture phenomenon that intersects with the academic world.

Juliette Blevins‘ book Evolutionary Phonology was just reviewed on LinguistList. The text of the review is copied below.

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David Pogue, Technology/Circuits columnist for The New York Times, has a review of the new Apple laptop with the Intel Core Duo chip, called the MacBook Pro. Apple’s high-end laptop line has for a long time now been known as PowerBook, and Pogue has this to say about the “inexplicable” name change:

Why do Mac fans despise the new name so much? Partly because all those harsh consonants — K, K, P — make the name uglier and harder to say.

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