April 6, 2026
Regular readers will be familiar with Strong Language, a group blog about swearing that I co-founded with James Harbeck in 2014. If you’re interested in swearing as a linguistic or cultural phenomenon, I recommend bookmarking or subscribing to it.
New posts by our excellent contributors are less frequent now, but that makes it easier to catch up if you haven’t visited before or feel like browsing the archives. The blog has over 400 posts: fascinating and colourful explorations of profanity for readers not averse to such material.
I also contribute to Strong Language now and then, and this post on Sentence first introduces the last few that I wrote. What follows below is not very sweary – there’s one reference to a strong swear – but if this type of language freaks you out like it does Ned Flanders, or just plain doesn’t interest you, you may prefer to bail out here.
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve Vance
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etymology, language, linguistics, slang, usage, words | Tagged: blogging, etymology, language, linguistics, pop culture, pragmatics, profanity, slang, strong language, swearing, usage, words | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
February 10, 2026
An open linguistic question was raised recently on Bluesky by Darach Ó Séaghdha: What do we call those cutesie slang phrases that have become productive in the UK lately, like genny lec for ‘general election’ and menty b for ‘mental breakdown’?
In response I wrote a short thread, which I already disagree with. So I’ll pick up the discussion here on Sentence first, where there’s more room, it’s easier to find, and it’s probably less ephemeral than on social media.
We can show this linguistic fad as having two main stereotyped patterns or formulas, which overlap morphologically. For type 1, we take a word or short phrase, clip (i.e., truncate, abbreviate) the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix, and reduce the next word or stressed syllable to its initial letter:
mental breakdown → menty b
nervous breakdown → nervy b
a hundred percent → hundy p
tomato ketchup → tommy k
sauvignon blanc → savvy b
ChatGPT → chatty g
lockdown → locky d
pandemic → panny d
Clapham Junction → Clappy J
For type 2, we clip the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix (same as type 1 so far), clip the next word or stressed syllable, and, optionally, add an s-suffix:
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25 Comments | etymology, humour, language, linguistics, phrases, slang, wordplay | Tagged: affixation, British slang, clippings, cozzie livs, etymology, genny lec, genny lex, humour, hun, hun culture, hypocorisms, language, linguistics, menty b, phrases, platty joobs, slang, wordplay | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
July 10, 2025
Before they gather any more digital dust, here are a few dozen links on a linguistic theme – etymology, grammar, slang, dialect, gesture, writing, spelling, animal communication, etc. – for your reading and listening pleasure.
Ope.
On slop.
Holy mackerel!
On balk and baulk.
Whence the backslash?
The grammar of “was trulyn’t”.
On deep reading vs “digital orality”.
Janet Malcolm vs English as she is spoke.
Pronoun research: an annotated bibliography.
What does it mean to live without handwriting?
Hallucinating Parrots, a new blog on the linguistics of AI.
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Posted by Stan Carey
April 24, 2025
In the Preface to his landmark Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson wrote that ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride’. Any dictionary, any grammar, is but a snapshot: all living languages change, and they do so constantly and at every level.
Yet there is an instinct in many of us to fix aspects of our language or to nudge it in this or that direction. It’s commonplace to the point of banality to flinch at a pronunciation, spelling, idiom, or other usage. The trick is to acknowledge the subjectivity (and usually futility, and often infelicity) of such a feeling – maybe even to get over it.
The caricature of prescriptivism – the prescribing of norms in language use – is of pedants and purists decrying variation and innovation in language, insisting on style rules they learned in school. But prescriptivism is a broad church. It can make a linguistic variety more consistent, enhancing its communicative reach and facility. Some prescriptivism, contra the conservative stereotype, is progressive, advocating a more inclusive lexicon.
Prescriptivism as a field of study is likewise impressively rich and complex, and this is evidenced in the recent book New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research (2024), whose publisher, Multilingual Matters, kindly sent me a copy. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, who edited the collection astutely with María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra, summarises its approach:
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5 Comments | book reviews, books, language, linguistics, usage | Tagged: book review, books, Javier Pérez-Guerra, language, language history, linguistic research, linguistics, María E. Rodríguez-Gil, Multilingual Matters, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, prescriptivism, research, sociolinguistics, usage | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
June 1, 2024
A selection of topical language-related links for your reading (or listening) pleasure. I have cameos in a couple of them:
I am not a typo.
Linguistic capture errors.
How robins got their name.
The endangered-language crisis.
The ritual of rearranging your books.
The strange short history of literary fiction.
The Makers of the Oxford English Dictionary.
New climate- and environment-related terms in BSL.
The auditory aesthetics of constructed languages.
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 15, 2023
The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines?
HBO just [greenlight] Season 2.
Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works.
The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT.
If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for that.
In this post I’ll look at the usage patterns of greenlit and greenlighted, based on corpus data (graphs! lots of graphs!). I’ll describe the verb’s origins and analyze it with reference to irregular verbs generally and -light compounds specifically. Finally, I’ll discuss which to choose, with an eye on future trends.
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18 Comments | editing, etymology, grammar, language, linguistics, morphology, spelling, usage, words, writing | Tagged: corpus linguistics, editing, etymology, film, gaslight, grammar, greenlight, irregular verbs, jargon, language, linguistics, morphology, slang, spelling, usage, Vanity Fair, verbs, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
July 26, 2023
A round-up of linguistic items – essays, news, blog posts, papers, and podcasts on language – for your enjoyment and diversion:
Learning Na’vi.
On plurals of hapax.
Birds in English place names.
A selection of Irish-language slang.
Unpacking the Madeline Kripke Collection.
Neutralizing the accents of call centre workers.
The unexpected joys of Denglisch and Berlinglish.
History of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (podcast, 30 min.).
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8 Comments | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: dialect, Irish English, language, language change, language podcasts, linguistics, links, podcasts, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 