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Of Women, Men, and Glasses of Wine
I have now settled into temporary digs in Paris, from which I’ll be sending Lingua Franca missives for the next five months. I have dusted off my French and plan to delight in a language that, I...
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The Cross-Lingual Interse(x)tionality of ‘Latinx’
Latinx isn’t a misprint. Whether it be labeled a proto- or neologism, the cross-lingual noun/adjective aims to transcend the male privilege in Latino and to unlink Latin@ from the channeled...
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What Are Your Exceptional Euphemisms This Spring?
Every culture has its euphemisms. In English we talk about correctional facilities and putting our pets to sleep. Here in Paris, I’m struck by two expressions that seem ubiquitous, especially in this...
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Copy Editors Are OCD. Thank Goodness.
Jorge Luis Borges: largely unedited (AP Photo/Eduardo Di Baia) “The universe needs more good editors,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a letter to his students. He added, “God knows.” Vonnegut was right. Last...
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Koko Is Dead, but the Myth of Her Linguistic Skills Lives On
Ron Cohn/Courtesy of the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org One area outshines all others in provoking crazy talk about language in the media, and that is the idea of language acquisition in nonhuman...
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Clean, Well-Spoken: Hemingway’s Cuban Spanish
Ernest Hemingway at home in Cuba, October 1954. (Leonard McCombe, The LIFE Images Collection, Getty Images) “I write suspicious books that take place in foreign countries: France and Italy, Communist...
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Puerto Rican in Spain: 2 Grad Students Reflect on Language and Spanish Higher...
U. of Barcelona Wireliz Soto-González recently completed her master’s in art history at the University of Barcelona. Jorge Fernández de Jesús received a master’s in biology at the University of...
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Chinese Among High-School Seniors (and in the Movies)
Jason Statham and Bingbing Li in The Meg, a bilingual Chinese/American movie. There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as...
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Nonsense About Universal Translation, Strictly for the Gullible
As I have often observed before, when it comes to language, people seem to think they can just make stuff up. Even patently absurd claims about language elicit no fact-checking. Editors limply allow...
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A Pocket Brexicon for American Academics
American politics is divided and rancorous, but Americans living in Britain are witnessing something far worse — an astonishing collapse in national unity and politico-economic rationality. The...
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