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 | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
February 27, 2023
Sometimes what I read tells me what to write about. Other times the hints come from what I watch. This time it’s both. First I read a line in Richard Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions with this mighty stack of intensifying negatives:
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47 Comments | dialect, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, pragmatics, speech, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: 000000, 1, 2, ambiguity, descriptivism, dialect, double negatives, ffffff, grammar, language, language history, language myths, linguistics, misnegation, multiple negation, negation, negative concord, Otto Jespersen, politics of language, pragmatics, prescriptivism, Richard Pryor, sociolinguistics, speech, standardized English, syntax, usage, usage myths, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
June 24, 2022
Language change is something I watch closely, both as a copy-editor and as someone broadly interested in how we communicate. I read usage dictionaries for fun; I also read a lot of fiction, and sometimes, as a treat, it throws up explicit commentary on shifts or variation in usage.*
This happened most recently in Consumed (Scribner, 2014) by David Cronenberg (whose thoughts on language invention I covered earlier this year). Nathan, a young photojournalist, is visiting Roiphe, an elderly doctor, who calls Nathan ‘son’ just before the passage below, emphasizing the generational gap. They’re sitting in Roiphe’s kitchen:
“Want some ice water? Maybe coffee? Anything?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“ ‘I’m good’ is funny. Sounds funny to me. We never used to say that. We’d say ‘I’m fine. I’m all right.’ But they do say ‘I’m good’ these days. So what are we looking at here?”
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14 Comments | books, dialect, language, linguistics, literature, usage, writing | Tagged: Ammon Shea, Consumed, dasn't, dassn't, David Cronenberg, descriptivism, dialect, fiction, film, I'm good, language, language change, linguistics, literature, modal verbs, sociolinguistics, usage, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
December 6, 2020
Podcasts have become a bigger part of my media consumption than I expected they would. I’ll stick to linguistic ones here, in keeping with the blog’s theme. New ones keep appearing, leading to dilemmas in time management, but it’s a happy kind of dilemma.
Here, in alphabetical order, are a handful of good language podcasts that entered the scene in 2019–2020. Episode lengths, given in parentheses, are approximate.
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16 Comments | language, linguistics, podcasts, speech, words | Tagged: AAVE, Black English, Black Language, etymology, language, language history, language podcasts, Lexis, linguistics, podcasts, politics of language, punctuation, sociolinguistics, speech, Standing on Points, stories, Subtitle, Word Matters, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
August 21, 2020
Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Trouble with Harry (1955), amidst all its talk of murder and romance, has a fun little exchange of sociolinguistic interest between John Forsythe (‘Sam Marlowe’) and Edmund Gwenn (‘Capt. Albert Wiles’):
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4 Comments | dialect, film, grammar, humour, language, linguistics, usage | Tagged: Abby Kaplan, acting, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Korzybski, dialect, Edmund Gwenn, ethnolinguistics, film, General Semantics, grammar, humour, language, language acquisition, linguistics, prescriptivism, sociolinguistics, The Birds, The Trouble with Harry, Tippi Hedren, usage, whilst | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
December 11, 2019
Culchie is a word used in Irish English to mean someone from the Irish countryside (or a small town or village), especially from the point of view of a Dubliner. Though originally pejorative, culchie has been partly reclaimed and is now often used neutrally, warmly, or as a tribal badge by those who live or come from beyond the Pale (i.e., Dublin and its urban environs).
While the word’s meaning is clear enough, its origin is uncertain and much speculated upon, as we’ll see. First, I’ll look at its use in Irish culture and literature. Its phonetic similarity to culture, incidentally, informed the aptly named (and now defunct) pop culture website Culch.ie, where I used to write about cult films – the URL trades nicely on Ireland’s internet top-level domain .ie.
The equivalent of a culchie elsewhere might be a bumpkin, a peasant, or a yokel. In Ireland the synonyms are likewise derogatory: bogger (bogman, bogwoman), mucker, the gloriously suggestive muck savage. So too is the antonym jackeen, referring to a certain type of Dubliner.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable notes that while culchie was initially an insult indicating rusticity, it now tends to be used in jest or affection, a change owing to Ireland’s modernisation, specifically ‘the rise in the standard of living and in educational standards in Ireland from the 1960s onwards’.
Mayo countryside: briars, stone walls, mossy verges, sheep, cattle, and muck are fond and familiar sights to any culchie worth their salt straw
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16 Comments | books, dialect, etymology, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, slang, words | Tagged: 000000, books, culchie, Culchie Festival, dialect, etymology, Hiberno-English, insults, Ireland, Irish books, Irish English, Irish language, irish literature, Irish slang, language, language history, pragmatics, semantic shift, semantics, slang, sociolinguistics, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
January 11, 2019
Happy new year to readers and visitors of Sentence first (which, I just noticed, turned ten last year). If you’re into language or linguistics, you should find a few things to interest you below. Don’t eat them all at once.
Why was writing invented?
Why do we call it a paperback?
Black English and who gets to use it.
The emotional portmanteau pentagram.
Morph: a blog about languages and how they change.
Tweetolectology: exploring language change via social media.
Using machines to understand ancient languages.
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13 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, slang, sociolinguistics, translation, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
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.
Sentence first 