Speech style – Arnold Zwicky's Blog

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Three for the weekend

June 12, 2010, 8:26 am

For Commencement Weekend at Stanford, a series of cartoons. The first set has three New Yorker cartoons, from a while back; in trying to bring some order into my living and working spaces, I’m...

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Writing like a fag

August 24, 2010, 11:12 am

… or, more genteelly, using a distinctly gay male writing style. Or more allusively, writing with a lavender quill. This has come up in passing in my mention of “embeddedness”, in a thicket of...

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On Language Log recently, a Dinosaur Comics cartoon by Ryan North, with commentary by the cartoonist, entitled WHAT ARE THE HAPS MY FRIENDS It looks like the more common version of the idiom is “What’s...

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how / that

November 25, 2010, 4:16 pm

Comic Blunt Card with how used as a complementizer, roughly like that: (Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.) There is now some literature on complementizer how, in particular Legate, Julie Anne. 2010. On how...

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Got X?

April 12, 2011, 10:20 am

I suppose it was inevitable: Got dick?, on the model of Got milk?, seen here on a t-shirt, from one of several sources for such items: Milk and dick are phonologically similar: monosyllables with the...

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The Social Network

June 5, 2011, 5:10 pm

Finally got around to watching The Social Network (a.k.a. The Facebook Movie) this morning. Stunning movie — a tragedy of ambition realized and of friendship betrayed, dark in many places (and visually...

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Accents

November 18, 2011, 8:57 am

Haefeli cartoon in the latest New Yorker (November 21st): The power of accents. Everybody knows, at some level, that our speech styles vary according to social context — who we’re talking to, about...

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Geek days

May 22, 2012, 10:39 am

Just learned that Thursday Friday is Geek Pride Day and was reminded that I should post some observations from Lal Zimman on the “geek voice”. Geek Pride Day, from the Wikipedia page: Geek Pride Day is...

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Lowlife dialogue

June 6, 2012, 9:40 am

Carl Hiaasen, interviewed in the NYT Book Review on June 3rd: What book is on your night stand now? “Raylan,” by Elmore Leonard, one of my writing heroes. There is nobody better at lowlife dialogue....

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Overlapping

September 9, 2012, 10:38 am

Yesterday’s “TV mystery theme song” on local radio station KFJC — identify the show and win movie tickets to the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto — was Al Jarreau’s recording of the theme to...

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Two political cartoonists

May 25, 2015, 3:15 am

To link to a posting on Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, some notes on Watterson’s favorite political / editorial cartoonists, Pat Oliphant and Jim Borgman. On Oliphant, from Wikipedia: Patrick...

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Tawkin’ the tawk

October 7, 2015, 6:15 pm

An op-ed piece in the NYT on Monday (the 5th) by my old friend Michael Newman (who professes linguistics at Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY) entitled “Voters May Just Want to ‘Tawk’” (in...

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