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- Badri on Letting My Spit Do the Talking
- Carol Kagan on “Pain from an old wound”
- Ambuja on Letting My Spit Do the Talking, part II
- Projectrevo on In Defense of Semantic Quibbling
- Janice on DNA Test Reveals White Girl Is White
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Author Archives: nkrishna
A Use for Bibles in Disaster Zones
You know those folks who travel to disaster zones (Haiti, Oklahoma, etc.) and hand out not food, not medicine, but Bibles? Turns out they’re not useless after all–as long as the Bibles have leather covers. You see, back in Renaissance … Continue reading
“Pain from an old wound”
“Nostalgia” means “pain from an old wound,” so says common knowledge. The problem with common knowledge is that it is often wrong. Nostalgia has nothing to do with old wounds, and only a little to do with pain. The other … Continue reading
Secular India
A man named Narendra Dabholkar was assassinated in India yesterday. I’d never heard of him. I’m even less tuned into to Indian rationalist networks than I am to American ones. Yet this bothered the hell out of me, more than … Continue reading
DNA Test Reveals White Girl Is White
Previously, I’d done some analysis on the results of the DNA test I’d completed recently. That can be found here: (Background | Results). My fiancée asked if I could do a write-up about her results too, so I did, and … Continue reading
Letting My Spit Do the Talking, part II
Previously on Hapax Legomenon… I ordered a test from 23andMe.com, spit in a tube and sent it back. Six weeks later, I have results in my browser. I had made some educated guesses about what I might find. We’ll see … Continue reading
Letting My Spit Do the Talking
My recorded family history doesn’t go back more than four or five generations. For thousands of years, Indians didn’t really keep records on genealogy unless you were a king. My family were priests, so most records were transmitted orally… until … Continue reading
Pet peeve—the YA Literary Love Triangle
Small rant ahead.
The Language of Science: it’s OK to be prescriptivist
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Tumblr lately (I also post a lot of these blog posts on Tumblr, so yay!—built-in audience). To my surprise, I’ve discovered a not insignificant number of linguistically-oriented people on there. We talk … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Science
Tagged language, linguistics, prescriptivism, science, semantics
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In Defense of Semantic Quibbling
This is in the Bad Linguistics category, but not an official entry in the series, as I’d prefer to reserve that for scientifically inept interpretations of linguistic evidence, and not just people misunderstanding why linguistics matters, because that would generate … Continue reading
One nation, under God, in English only
You have got to be kidding me. Fury is brewing at Rocky Mountain High School, in Colorado, after a multicultural student group were encouraged to recite the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker in Arabic – replacing ‘one nation under … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Politics, Religion
Tagged Arabic, English, fuckwits, Islam, pledge of allegiance
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