→ Not old enough, by half - Language Log (sorry, twice in one day!) reports on a letter in Dan Savage's love advice column, "Savage Love". "There is some vaguely delimited age at which you stop counting your age in steps smaller than one year, and the age at which it seems reasonable to say that a person is mature enough for the responsibilities of sexual activity seems (forgive me, sexually active junior high-schoolers) to be broadly after that point." :/: No Comments »
→ Language Log on The Guardian on how jokes work - "At this point, I'm beginning to think that 'Stewart Lee' is the invention of a team of writers from the Onion. There are no doubt some cultural differences in deploying sexual allusions in humor, but are saunas really a ubiquitous fixture of modern German family life, or has 'Lee' carelessly displaced this practice a country or two southwards? And aren't there any metaphors for English-German translation that don't involve WWI or WWII?" :/: No Comments »
It took me almost an hour to read three pages of this linguistics paper. Not because it was impossible, mind you, but because I was having a good time. I would see something I didn’t understand, look it up in another book, and then in that book find something interesting - and then […]