Society for Linguistic Anthropology Susan Hill April 2, 2018 In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary shortlisted the noun-turned-verb-turned-gerund “adulting” for its Word of the Year designation. Oxford defined adulting as “the… Read More »#Adulting and the Disordered State of American Adulthood
Lessons from Charlottesville Since the violent events that took place in Charlottesville, VA, this past August, when a white supremacist rally led to the killing… Read More »AN column: “Free Speech” in Times of Conflict by Lise M. Dobrin and Eve Danziger
Please see the following for an end-of-year index of Adam Hodges’s Trumped Up Words columns on the Anthropology News website. Adam assures us there are more… Read More »Adam Hodges’s 2017 “Trumped Up Words” columns
From Anthropology News Trump’s Formulaic Twitter Insults Trumped Up Words Adam Hodges Every presidential transition also involves a change in the regime of language. This… Read More »AN News: Trump’s Formulaic Twitter Insults
This morning in my English composition class, composed mainly of Japanese speakers, I came upon another pitfall of relying on “in the dictionary” as a test of acceptability. The verb ‘ruralize’, which rarely appears in books published after 1940, is nevertheless present in bilingual dictionaries.
If a dog wore pants, would word meaning help us decide what they should look like? Using prototype theory and native speaker judgements, we find no clear, shared definition of the word ‘pants’. The results point to gradient understanding of meaning.
Anthropology News Article In Greater New Orleans, there is an enregistered (Agha 2003) dialect of English that sounds similar to New York City English, making… Read More »AN News: “Linguistic and Local Peripherality: The Case of Chalmatians in Greater New Orleans” by Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech)
Annie Claus’s essay, “How a professional writer improved my academic writing” at Savage Minds is quite useful. She counsels academics to resist overly long sentences, to vary the structure of paragraphs, and to reflect on each element of the paper and what it contributes to communicating the message. I differ with Claus, however, in cautioning against a particular set of words. At the risk of being labeled a positivist, I’ve compared the frequency of “insipid grammatical markers” in American Anthropologist, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and the work of Joan Didion. The results, to paraphrase an academic writing cliche, are a bit more complicated.
The January 7th attacks in France caused great sadness, anger, and fear. They also occasioned outpourings of support, and analyses of what went wrong. Some responses assert that religiously inspired terrorism is “unique” to Islam. Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian violence show that this is incorrect. Understanding religious violence requires careful analysis, not easy assertions.
Several colleagues have suggested film and video clips that may be useful in teaching about language ideologies, including the value of standard and non-standard varieties, social stereotypes, and style shifting. This post includes several YouTube videos.