Ben Zimmer seems to have a pretty good platform here in the US.
Jaclyn
Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse typos and brevity!
On May 6, 2015, at 3:54 PM, "TRUDGILL Peter" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Perhaps I might immodestly mention my own newspaper column, which appears every Monday in the Norwich-area Eastern Daily Press (don’t know whether this counts as “well-circulated” but it is the nation’s biggest-selling regional daily morning newspaper with a circulation of c. 50,000). E-copies can be purchased on Mondays for 75p at http://www.edp24.co.uk/home/e-edition. An archive of previous columns (c. three year’s worth) is available free at http://www.norfolkdialect.com/speaking.htm. A book of the columns, edited and annotated, is coming out with CUP, probably later this year. It is to be called Dialect Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language - Columns from the Eastern Daily Press.
Peter
On 6 May 2015, at 15:26, George Walkden <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
I don't think the situation's that dire, at least in the UK. David Shariatmadari, who's linguistics-trained, frequently publishes in the Guardian on language issues. And Oliver Kamm, though a more traditional journo, is pretty clued-up about modern linguistics and has a column in the Times (inappropriately titled "The Pedant", as he's anything but). And Gretchen McCulloch's stuff tends to get quite a wide circulation.
- George
On 6 May 2015, at 15:22, Robert Lawson <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Your last comment echos a similar point made by Doug Bigham, who started Popular Linguistics.
That said, publications like Babel appear to be doing quite well for general readers and there's a lot of stuff being published via social media that could certainly be counted as 'infiltrating popular science'.
________________________________
From: Variationist List [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] on behalf of Bryan James Gordon [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Sent: 06 May 2015 15:06
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Court says Skype's name is too similar to Sky's
Jammies, tennies, etc. There's nothing Australia-specific about diminutives on words that are not diminutive somewhere else, and "informality" as an index of diminutives is about as shallow and n+1th-order as it gets. If anything, informality indices are not unlike other diminutive indices at all, but rather the index that is shared by all diminutives - and by any variants remotely associated with "slang" to boot. I also doubt "rustbucket" as cited in a 1965 newspaper in Sydney is its original occurrence. I've heard this word from older relatives in parts of the rural US Deep South whose lifelong media exposure has consisted largely of preachers and hunting shows. Granted, they may have picked it up from younger relatives, or from a cosmopolitan-leaning car-repair show, but I'm skeptical of the assumption that this word really began only 50 years ago in Sydney.
The real problem here is that the only person I know who's written a well-circulated language column based on actual empirical facts was not even a linguist, and has since moved on. Why is it us linguists aren't stepping up to the plate and infiltrating popular science?
Bryan
2015-05-06 7:52 GMT-05:00 Patrick, Peter L <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>:
I agree with Adam (but probably go further...)
This might be more a topic for ADS-L but I am not willing to accept most of the ones in this article as Australian in origin -
either the ones that are wildly common in everyday British English and seem likely to have been so for a long time,
or those that I grew up with as American slang (eg "crash") and have never remotely associated with Oz. How they
would have disseminated so widely by the early 1970s at latest, in an era with no Aussie TV etc in the US, etc, is beyond me...
I suspect there is a strong ideological component in this claiming of origins, which runs something like this:
The English are by definition all posh compared to Australians
Thus British English vernacular cannot be authentic
Anything vernacular found in Australia must therefore be Australian in origin
The focus mainly seems to be on reclaiming from the Brits, as nearly all the items said to "have made their way into global English"
are noticeably absent from US usage and sound very non-American (though I can't say about Canada which of course has many
more Briticisms) to me. There may be a similar ideology aimed at US usage but it doesn't surface much here.
Of course the article fudges tremendously by first saying "phrases derived from or chiefly used in Australian English ", and then going
on to claim as "Australian" any items which are simply in common use down under. Since the OED entries make no reference to frequency
to begin with, there is not even an argument that they are in MORE common use in OZ than the UK, much less that they originate from Oz.
Pretty poor from the Beeb. Will the election coverage later this week be equally unreliable?...
-p-
-----Original Message-----
From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] On Behalf Of Adam Schembri
Sent: 06 May 2015 12:02
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Court says Skype's name is too similar to Sky's
Well, while we’re on the topic of the BBC website, Dave, I don’t really buy this:
http://www.test.bbc.com/culture/story/20150427-pervs-greenies-and-ratbags
As an Australian who lived in London for nearly five years, it’s quite clear where we Australians got ‘mate’ and ‘bloody’ from. I don’t buy that some of the others are Australian: ‘selfie’ may have first been recorded in Australia, but I suspect it was created independently in multiple parts of the English speaking world.
Cheers,
Adam
--
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Department of Languages & Linguistics | School of Humanities and Social Sciences | College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce | La Trobe University | Melbourne (Bundoora) | Victoria | 3086 | Australia |Tel :
+61 3 9479 2887<tel:%2B61%203%209479%202887> | Twitter: @AdamCSchembri | Director, Centre for
+Research
on Language Diversity http://www.latrobe.edu.au/crld & Linguistics Discipline Research Program| Sign Language Linguistics Society:
http://www.slls.eu<http://www.slls.eu/> <http://www.slls.eu/> | ALLY Network Member supporting GLBTIQ students and staff: www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally<http://www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally> http://www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally
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<http://www.cambridge.org/9781107663862>
On 6/05/2015 20:41, "Dave Sayers" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>I thought this might tickle VAR-Lers:
>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32593735
>
>Dave
>
>--
>Dr. Dave Sayers
>Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University Honorary
>Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University
>(2009-2015)
>[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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