The Morbid Linguist

News media seems to have made it a standard to identify someone according to profession, or some other social label, even when irrelevant to the respective story. One example of this is seen in reports about Eric Lundgren; headlines seemingly label their stories as coverage of a legal battle between an “e-waste recycler” and tech giant Microsoft. Many headlines resemble these: Electronics-recycling innovator is going to prison for trying to extend computers’ lives [ LA Times ] ‘E-waste’ recycling innovator faces prison after losing fight with Microsoft [ Seattle Times ] E-waste Innovator Will Go to Jail for Making Windows Restore Disks That Only Worked with Valid Licenses [ Gizmodo ] E-waste Recycler gets 15-months in Prison Thanks to Microsoft [ Legit Reviews ] From these headlines, one could infer the subjective opinions of the writers: This humble “e-waste recycler”, however innovative, is jail-bound because of Microsoft, and likely for some unfair reason. Many of the headlin...

The Nursery Note One of the most famous kidnapping cases in American history is that of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The child’s father and namesake was Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. Lindbergh, Sr. had completed his record-breaking transatlantic flight in 1927, and he was still a prominent celebrity when his 20-month-old son was kidnapped from his nursery on the night of March 1, 1932. The infant was not recovered until May 12, 1932, when his body was discovered near the Lindbergh home. Investigators determined that he likely died shortly after he was taken.  Between the night of March 1 and when ransom is delivered on April 2, 1932, the abductors delivered a total of 15 notes . In September 1934, a German immigrant was seen spending one of the gold certificates used to pay the ransom and was soon arrested. He was convicted and executed in 1936.  Mark Falzini , the archivist of the New Jersey State Police Museum in possession of the notes and other evidence, i...

Cross-linguistic transfer, native language interference, and interlanguage errors are some of the terms for referring to the concept that users of particular languages have characteristic production patterns when using a second language. Cross-linguistic Influence (CLI) refers to the concept that language learners will rely on experience from their L1 to compensate for weaknesses in their target language. All native language analyses rely on the theories central to CLI: That a person’s L1 is their strongest and so they will rely on that language’s structure to compensate for weaknesses in their L2. When the L1 and L2 have different language structures, the resulting language may contain cross-linguistic transfers. To use a metaphor: Those cross-linguistic transfers are as if a target language’s skin is stretched over the native language’s skeleton. The message may still be understood, but the delivery is unnaturally forced; the degree of unnatural depending on the differences of skin...

There is an old adage about snowflakes that is often extended to fingerprints to say that both are unique and never the same. Some people have tried to say the same about language use. I honestly don't know who says language use is unique, because every time I come across the phrase "linguistic fingerprint" in a paper, it's when the author is disparaging the concept. The idea of linguistic fingerprint, sometimes idiolect, supposes that the way a person uses language is unique to each individual, like their fingerprints. "Linguistic fingerprinting" is a metaphor, not a method. At the risk of looking stupid by talking about things I don't fully understand, it seems that the chances of a false fingerprint match are long odds to say the least. Some experts estimate that the odds of multiple minutiae points matching are in numbers that I think are in the negative-point-millions? (I'm really bad at math, I couldn't figure out the exponents.) E...

The word "idiolect" is formed from combining a back-formation of the "-lect" part of "dialect" and the Greek prefix idio- (meaning "own, personal, distinct, peculiar"). So an idiolect is the distinctive and unique way a person uses language. It's also a debated topic within linguistics, especially about whether they exist and/or can be described. I've mentioned before, when describing linguistic profiling, that some of a person's demographic info (gender, age, education, etc.) can potentially be deduced from their language use. It's too easy to get philosophical about individuality and idiolects. Look into social statistics to get a sense of what I mean by that. Let's instead keep the focus on you. Let's talk about your idiolect. Like many aspects of your identity, the way you use language is shaped by the kind of human you are and the life you've lived. There are so many factors of your life that have shaped the w...

There are two types of people: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Especially when it comes to grammar. Most linguists are descriptivists. Your high school grammar teacher was a prescriptivist. A linguistic prescriptivist believes that language use works on a scale of "correct" to "incorrect" based on adherence to a prescribed set of rules. A linguistic descriptivist believes that language users are the writers of those rules, and they are satisfied to describe  the rules those users seem to agree on. I'm going to describe and compare descriptivism and prescriptivism, and it might sound like they're opposing philosophies... but I can't promise that they aren't. In linguistics, the variety of language that most frequently adheres to that language's prescribed rules is called the "standard language." Which variety gets to be the standard depends on each language, country, culture, history, colonialism, and so on. A standard language i...