Language Module

As a kind of followup to yesterday’s post - I notice that today on PrawfsBlog there is a post about whether to use “data” and “media” with plural agreement. Prawfs comes down firmly on the side of singular agreement - which I personally applaud.

‘Media’ and ‘data’ are mass nouns expressing uncountable quantities. When used [...]

Every profession has its bugbears - those bits of “common sense” that fall into its domain that the public earnestly believes in but which are totally incoherent when examined. For Economists, it’s the make-work fallacy, for Astronomers, it’s the idea that proximity to the sun causes the seasons, for Statisticians it’s likely to [...]

LanguageHat has a post called Chechens don’t lightly curse that’s about just what it says. Chechens, apparently, take cursing very seriously - to the point that telling someone to “fuck their mother,” a common expression in Russian, is a killing (or at least a fighting) matter in Chechen. Or, so says Anatol Lieven [...]