December 15, 2025
The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.
Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.1
Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books.2 This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity. It extends, as we have seen, to swallows:
She watched the sudden, fast shadows of swallows who flew past her window in fleeting pairs, subtracting light from her room, and marvelled how living things could suspend themselves in mid-air. (Claire Keegan, ‘Men and Women’, in Antarctica)
And, from the same writer, sheep:
I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep who stare, bewildered, from the car.
Ducks:
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13 Comments | 
animals, birds, books, grammar, language, nature, usage, writing | Tagged: anaphora, animals, birds, books, grammar, Jane Goodall, language, literature, nature, pronouns, relative pronouns, usage, which, who, writing | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
October 11, 2025
The conversion of nouns to verbs (to impact, to medal, to leverage, to architect) is a continual object of criticism and word rage. But language has been verbing for as long as it has languaged. In fact, there’s nothing that can’t be verbed if you put your mind to it.
‘What about someone’s name?’ you might ask. ‘What about Agatha Christie?’
I’m glad you picked that example. Because the new FX series Alien: Earth offers this great line in its second episode, ‘Mr. October’ (a mild swear word follows):
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9 Comments | humour, language, pragmatics, semantics, slang, wordplay, words, writing | Tagged: Agatha Christie, Alien: Earth, conversion, detective, detective fiction, eponyms, humour, language, language change, Noah Hawley, pragmatics, screenwriting, semantics, slang, TV, verbing, verbs, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
July 10, 2025
Before they gather any more digital dust, here are a few dozen links on a linguistic theme – etymology, grammar, slang, dialect, gesture, writing, spelling, animal communication, etc. – for your reading and listening pleasure.
Ope.
On slop.
Holy mackerel!
On balk and baulk.
Whence the backslash?
The grammar of “was trulyn’t”.
On deep reading vs “digital orality”.
Janet Malcolm vs English as she is spoke.
Pronoun research: an annotated bibliography.
What does it mean to live without handwriting?
Hallucinating Parrots, a new blog on the linguistics of AI.
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1 Comment | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: etymology, language, language podcasts, linguistics, links, podcasts, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
June 16, 2025
A new book spine poem, on a linguistic (and mildly sweary) theme, with some notes on its contents below the photograph.
*
Swearing Is Good for You
The F-word – spell it out:
Swearing is good for you.
Um . . . holy shit. Says who?
The man who lost his language swearing
*gestures* because internet
(What the F);
The woman who talked to herself
in praise of profanity
(Just my type).
Shady characters,
Role models.
*
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8 Comments | books, humour, language, photography, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: A.L. Barker, Anne Curzan, Benjamin Bergen, book spine poem, book spine poetry, bookmash, books, David Crystal, Desmond Morris, Emma Byrne, found poetry, Geoffrey Hughes, Gretchen McCulloch, humour, Jesse Sheidlower, John Waters, Keith Houston, language, Melissa Mohr, Michael Adams, Michael Erard, photography, poetry, profanity, Sheila Hale, Simon Garfield, swearing, visual poetry, wordplay | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
May 6, 2025
On many vexed matters of English usage, people can be divided into the following groups:
1. those who neither know nor care
2. those who do not know, but care very much
3. those who know and condemn
4. those who know and approve
5. those who know and distinguish.
Thus with wry wit did H. W. Fowler address the existence of split infinitives in his landmark usage dictionary of 1926. He concluded that the first group ‘are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes’.
Dangling catkins in the rural west of Ireland
Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.
As a copy-editor I’m in category 5: I routinely edit danglers to accord with the norms of formal written English. But they’re not always a flagrant error, and they’ve occurred in English since at least Chaucer’s day.
Let’s take a closer look.
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13 Comments | editing, grammar, language, pragmatics, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: ambiguity, dangling modifiers, descriptivism, editing, English usage, grammar, language, misplaced modifiers, pragmatics, prescriptivism, reading, syntax, usage, writing, writing style | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
April 24, 2025
In the Preface to his landmark Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson wrote that ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride’. Any dictionary, any grammar, is but a snapshot: all living languages change, and they do so constantly and at every level.
Yet there is an instinct in many of us to fix aspects of our language or to nudge it in this or that direction. It’s commonplace to the point of banality to flinch at a pronunciation, spelling, idiom, or other usage. The trick is to acknowledge the subjectivity (and usually futility, and often infelicity) of such a feeling – maybe even to get over it.
The caricature of prescriptivism – the prescribing of norms in language use – is of pedants and purists decrying variation and innovation in language, insisting on style rules they learned in school. But prescriptivism is a broad church. It can make a linguistic variety more consistent, enhancing its communicative reach and facility. Some prescriptivism, contra the conservative stereotype, is progressive, advocating a more inclusive lexicon.
Prescriptivism as a field of study is likewise impressively rich and complex, and this is evidenced in the recent book New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research (2024), whose publisher, Multilingual Matters, kindly sent me a copy. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, who edited the collection astutely with María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra, summarises its approach:
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5 Comments | book reviews, books, language, linguistics, usage | Tagged: book review, books, Javier Pérez-Guerra, language, language history, linguistic research, linguistics, María E. Rodríguez-Gil, Multilingual Matters, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, prescriptivism, research, sociolinguistics, usage | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
March 5, 2025
In my last post, about filmmaker and author Werner Herzog’s voice and its mimics, I promised an anecdote about the Oxford English Dictionary. That appears below with two shorter bits from Herzog’s recent memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All.
The publisher’s page for the book, I forgot to say before, has an excerpt read by Herzog, if that sounds like something you’d like to listen to.
That the OED is for Herzog ‘the book of books’ does not surprise me, given his love of learning and literature and his admiration for diligence and excellence. But he brings it up unexpectedly, in a medley passage in which he muses on his habits and nature:
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1 Comment | books, film, language, stories, writers | Tagged: autobiography, books, dictionaries, film, Greek, Latin, memoir, multilingual, multilingualism, OED, Oliver Sacks, relationships, stories, Werner Herzog | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first