The apostrophic War on the Holidays

I was fighting the urge to post about this piece on Slate, about how to pluralize your last name, and now officially give up. Anything that has this line is hard to resist reacting to:

It’s Christmas! Celebrate by not doing violence to the laws of pluralization.

Wow, I think, how do you do violence to the laws of pluralization? Wait ARE there laws of pluralization? Turns out there's outrage about 'stray apostrophes'. "Every year they assault me." Oh, about spelling. Got it. I won't review the green grocer's apostrophe here (but knock yourself out: here, for one.)

But plurals do get into the picture. (Say cheese.) Apparently there's deep worry about the Wolf family signing as 'The Wolves'. A card from the wolves? I'm cutting back on the eggnog at that point. They usually barely knock when they come to your house here in Wisconsin. That's what I call 'assault'.

Merry Thanksgiving and wishing you all lots of apostrophes for the holidays,
The Verb's

Found the image at a Walk in the Words. They have a nice little post on the topic.

Stumbling over and through Drink Wisconsinbly

Earlier this year, I started noticing t-shirts and hoodies bearing the phrase 'Drink Wisconsinbly', like in the image here. (And, yeah, it comes in green and gold as well as red and white.) Clever, right? But I don't read t-shirts all that closely and I saw it a few times before I realized that it doesn't work at all for me phonologically ... Wisconsably, yes, and Wisconsinably, I suppose, but not Wisconsinbly. I stumble over it every time, dead cold sober.

I'm seeing more and more of these shirts and hats (including the obligatory camo hat) and it now turn out that there's, of course, a website, http://drinkwisconsinbly.com/. "Proud home of the greatest drinking culture this fine nation has ever known." Cute, but I'm not sure that "We lacked an official call to arms" when it comes to drinking.

Looks like this thing is probably sponsored by the Tavern League of Wisconsin. If so, that may complicate the feel-good thing for some people ... among other things, the TLW is seen as keeping our drinking and driving laws lax, see here.

New journal alert: Ampersand (Elsevier)

The world seems to be bursting at the seams with linguistics news ... Word of the Year stuff is cranking up, and the frenzy over mapping language continues (see this cool piece from WaPo) and I'm more puzzled than ever about how language works.

But there's also a new journal, Ampersand, that just published its first article. It's part of the new wave of open access scholarly publishing, so you can get to material even without library privileges. The first article is definitely worth reading ... nice take on a classic issue.

Big announcement from Mr. Verb -- Career change

Dear readers,
You should be the first to know. After literally decades of studying how language works and changes and what it tells us about the mind, I'm moving on. From this day forward, I'll be studying ancient mating habits.

Yes, linguistics has allowed me tremendous opportunities to help understand our state's and nation's past and present and to serve communities around the state. And our students often go on to work for businesses outside of the academy that help grow the economy.

But from this day forward, it's ancient mating habits. Mating habits of what, you ask? Whatever, I say.

Yours verbally,

Mr. V

PS: Read this.