Thursday 14 January 2021

handsful

Delightfully, Language Log lampoons linguistic pretensions and sophistication with one scheme to achieve instant morphological classiness with awkward pluralisation—extending, inserting the correct but unexpected attorneys general and courts martial to other constructions. I especially appreciated this as somewhat self-consciously, pedantically I found myself whispering under my breath, it’s octopodes. The comment section is definitely worth one’s time, particularly for films noir which evokes Casablanca and the line “Of all the gin joints, on all the towns, in all the world, she walks in to mine” and the correct way, the stylebook to say quids pro quo. Quae pro quibus.