A false etymology is a false theory about the origin or derivation of a specific word or phrase. When a false etymology becomes a popular belief in a cultural/linguistic community, it is a folk etymology. Nevertheless, folk/popular etymology may also refer to the process by which a word or phrase is changed because of a popular false etymology. To disambiguate the usage of the term "folk/popular etymology", Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes a clear-cut distinction between the derivational-only popular etymology (DOPE) and the generative popular etymology (GPE): the DOPE refers to a popular false etymology involving no neologization, and the GPE refers to neologization generated by a popular false etymology.
Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.
Geoffrey Keith Pullum is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. Pullum has published over 300 articles and books on various topics in linguistics, including phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context. The autological word "eggcorn" is itself an eggcorn, derived from acorn. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them, as for example replacing "Alzheimer's disease" with "old-timers' disease", or William Shakespeare's "to the manner born" with "to the manor born".
Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative words. The basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Various grammatical rules and style guides determine which relative pronouns may be suitable in various situations, especially for formal settings. In some cases the relative pronoun may be omitted and merely implied.
Arnold Melchior Zwicky is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. The Linguistic Society of America’s Arnold Zwicky Award, given for the first time in 2021, is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ President of the LSA.
A snowclone is a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants. The term was coined in 2004, derived from journalistic clichés that referred to the number of Inuit words for snow.
Dwight Le Merton Bolinger was an American linguist and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He began his career as the first editor of the "Among the New Words" feature for American Speech. As an expert in Spanish, he was elected president of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese in 1960. He was known for the support and encouragement he gave younger scholars and for his hands-on approach to the analysis of human language. His work touched on a wide range of subjects, including semantics, intonation, phonesthesia, and the politics of language.
Geoffrey Nunberg was an American lexical semantician and author. In 2001, he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Nunberg was the author of a number of popular books, among them Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Controversial Times (2004). He is primarily known for his broadcast work interpreting linguistic science for lay audiences, though his contributions to linguistic theory are also well regarded.
Mark Yoffe Liberman is an American linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is the founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium. Liberman is the Faculty Director of Ware College House at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Female Brain is a book written by the American neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine in 2006. The main thesis of the book is that women's behavior is different from that of men due, in large measure, to hormonal differences. Brizendine says that the human female brain is affected by the following hormones: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, oxytocin, neurotransmitters, and that there are differences in the architecture of the brain that regulate such hormones and neurotransmitters.
Benjamin Zimmer is an American linguist, lexicographer, and language commentator. He is a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and contributing editor for The Atlantic. He was formerly a language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine, and editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. Zimmer was also an executive editor of Vocabulary.com and VisualThesaurus.com.
The recency illusion is the belief or impression, on the part of someone who has only recently become aware of a long-established phenomenon, that the phenomenon itself must be of recent origin. The term was coined by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who is primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions. However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent".
Nucular is a common, proscribed pronunciation of the word "nuclear". It is a rough phonetic spelling of. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry dates the word's first published appearance to 1943.
Douglas Glen Whitman is an American television writer and a professor of economics.
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme. English nouns primarily function as the heads of noun phrases, which prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements. These phrases are the only English phrases whose structure includes determinatives and predeterminatives, which add abstract-specifying meaning such as definiteness and proximity. Like nouns in general, English nouns typically denote physical objects, but they also denote actions, characteristics, relations in space, and just about anything at all. Taken all together, these features separate English nouns from other lexical categories such as adjectives and verbs.
Comprised of is an expression in English that means "composed of". This is thought by language purists to be improper because to "comprise" can already mean to "be composed of". By that definition, "comprised of" would be ungrammatical as it implies "composed of of". However, another widely accepted definition of to "comprise" is to "compose", hence the commonly accepted meaning of "comprised of" as "composed of".
Betty J. Birner is an American linguist. Her research focuses on pragmatics and discourse analysis, particularly the identification of the types of contexts appropriate for sentences with marked word order.
Barbara Caroline Scholz was an American philosopher of science, with a particular focus on the philosophy of cognitive science and linguistics. She taught at the University of Toledo, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at San Jose State University. She was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2005–2006. From 1994 until her death in 2011, she was married to linguist Geoff Pullum.
Anne C. Lobeck is an American linguist who specializes in syntactic theory and applied linguistics, with focus on linguistics and education. She is currently Professor of Linguistics at Western Washington University.
