Every Monday, I share some of what I’ve been reading in the past week.
Guess what word has the longest entry in the OED? Hint: it’s a short one.
I got a Ph.D. because of Jane Hill’s work. And she just keeps on getting better: “Mexican restaurant menus are hardly degenerate. Instead, they do a lot of delicate work in a dangerous linguistic environment. Around their colorful margins, there be dragons.”
You know I couldn’t resist a post about new (and probably short-lived) White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s potty mouth, and on various press decisions about how to report a lot of newsworthy vulgarities.
But hey, profanity can reduce sensitivity to pain! And by the way, profanity isn’t a way of compensating for a poor vocabulary – people who have a larger vocabulary of animal words have a larger vocabulary of swearwords. And people who curse more lie less.
Everyday linguistic anthropology 