Online Language Resources

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know, Grant, you and I read a lot of email newsletters, right?

And there’s one that I keep pressing on other people who are interested in language,

And that is Michael Quinian’s e-newsletter. I know you read it every week.

I do the same thing. I treat it like a religious tract.

I’m like, you must read this. It will change your life.

You do?

Yeah. Well, because people, the world is filled with bad information about language.

But Michael, who’s British, consistently gets it right, doesn’t he?

He is great. He is a dogged etymologist there at WorldWideWords.org.

For example, in a recent newsletter, I learned the word carrot mobbing, which you probably already know.

That’s a kind of social activism where people shop at a small business specially chosen for its good environmental practices.

Carrot mobbing, sort of like flash mobbing.

And so it has a lot of information like that in short, digestible pieces.

And at the very end, he offers this little lanyard, a little treat, which is a few headlines and bloopers and that kind of thing that people send in.

One of his emails came from a reader who said, a few days ago, I was down in Los Angeles and saw a sign which said, in full, shoes, three for $20.

I love that.

I don’t have a need for three shoes.

I love it.

I have a need for that sign.

I want to put it on our website.

Shoes, three for $20.

Anyway, that’s the email newsletter that I press on people who want to learn about language.

What about you?

My favorite new blog, and I’ve got a ton of these, is the one that linguist Arnold Zwicky has started keeping.

As you know, he is part of the Language Log Crowd.

That’s the big language-related group blog.

It’s fabulous.

But he’s got so much stuff that he wants to say.

He started his own blog on the side.

Now, Arnold is a visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford, but that doesn’t mean that he’s all stuffy.

A lot of his stuff is about comics or pop culture or something that somebody said on a television show.

So the entry point is very easy for anyone to get into.

One of my favorite posts that he had recently was about a woman who took her cat to get a haircut.

Now, she was from the south, and she’d moved to the north.

And so she told them, she said the same thing she would have said at home.

I need a line cut for my cat, L-I-N-E.

Well, when she got the cat back, they had given the cat a lion cut.

So he had a tuft on the end of the tail, big fluffy hair around his neck and his feet,

And the whole rest of the body was shaved.

The poor kitty does not look happy.

But this is Arnold’s way of talking about a really simple dialect pronunciation of line.

It comes out line.

That is beautiful.

And you can totally understand how somebody in the north where they don’t say line might misunderstand, right?

Sure.

But Arnold Zwicky, the blog is at arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com.

You can also just Google his name, Arnold Zwicky.

That’s Z-W-I-C-K-Y.

And you’ll come up with this page and his language log post as well.

Good stuff.

Good stuff.

Poor kitty.

If you’ve got a favorite blog that you’d like to share with us, give us a call.

Send us an email.

The email address is words@waywordradio.org, and the phone number is 1-877-929-9673.