Links, links, dozens of links! About language, linguistics, literature, and wordy stuff. Most are for reading, some (🎙) for listening.
How we read emoji.
The language of the hand.
Linguistic relativity: a primer.
‘Saying the quiet part out loud’.
Is AI really mastering language?
Toward a theory of the New Weird.
The many 👉 functions of pointing 👈.
People still prefer to read physical books.
The changing politics of the Russian language.
Bat singing, babbling, and other vocalizations (🎙).
Collecting Madeline Kripke’s dictionaries and the M-W Archive.
The origins of punching up and punching down (🎙).
OED100: Updating and expanding the OED.
Colourless green ideas before Chomsky.
Fictional gestures in sci-fi and fantasy.
The spread of subtitles on TikTok.
On reading from the ancients.
Making and taking decisions.
17 words from Japanese.
The Koko project (🎙).
Why writers write.
New French words.
It was a piece of cake.
The Murray Scriptorium.
A pretty informal adverb?
On finishing Finnegans Wake.
The language of cybersecurity.
The violent origins of well-heeled.
On the element of surprise in writing.
A glossary of editorial and publishing terms.
Emily Wilson on a classic translator’s dilemma.
The effects of storytelling on children in hospital.
What is the subject of a sentence? (Don’t ask Google.)
The politics of the Asturian language in Spain.
Saving Taiwan’s indigenous languages.
Inside the Oxford English Dictionary.
Why we say You’re welcome (🎙).
Seamus Heaney on dictionaries.
The United Fonts of America.
Speaking of prejudice (🎙).
Tackling linguistic racism.
You can, and you may.
Fun with speech balloons by Bizarro:
*
* Not a word I use often, but I included it in a recent essay, ‘How well read should editors be?’
Sentence first 
“Turkey is now Turkiye”: Only if you kowtow to ErdoÄŸan’s communique, which I don’t see why anyone outside Turkey should do. I confess myself baffled by the willingness, nay eagerness, of English-speakers to embrace the whims of dictators around the world as if they represented some form of social justice. “Oh, you don’t want us to say Burma any more, vicious military junta, you want us to say Myanmar, which we can’t even pronounce? Will do, you bet, right away sirs!” Your link is to TRT World, which is of course a mouthpiece of the ErdoÄŸan administration, and their “vast majority of people in Turkiye” is obvious nonsense. (Also, shouldn’t it be Türkiye?)
I take your criticism and have deleted the link. In this series I often omit context for the sake of concision, and on this occasion that was definitely a mistake – not the result, I might add, of deference to dictators. I hope you find something else here to counter the bad taste.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you were one of the baddies! You’re just posting interesting links; it just happened that that one set off my (very sensitive) enforced-name-change alarm and I started shooting from the hip. I didn’t expect you to delete the link (not that I mind, either); I was just registering my disapproval of dictators and their minions. You know I think nothing but good of you and your excellent posts!
No problem at all. It’s a useful alarm to have switched on! I wasn’t familiar with TRT World before adding the link; a bit more research would not have gone amiss, given the subject matter. I’ll do more than a cursory examination next time.
I am looking for James Joyce. Fascinating!
I hope you find him.