Pilot’s Lounge: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

26 October 2019

I recently did a podcast with my niece, Ania Wilton on the slang of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In their podcast Pilot’s Lounge, Ania and her cousin Chelsea Pula discuss the pilots, i.e., first episodes, of television series. This was a bonus episode where Ania and I sat down, sipped some scotch, and talked about the language used in Buffy.

RIP, John Algeo (1930–2019)

20 October 2019

John Algeo, linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, has passed. He will be missed. A former president of the American Dialect Society and editor of American Speech, he started the “Among the New Words” column in that journal that traced the appearance of neologisms in English.

Here is his obituary from the Bowling Green (Kentucky) Daily News.

The Guardian on Language Decline

16 August 2019

David Shariatmadari has a nice piece on the myth of the decline of the English language in The Guardian.

He writes:

There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to.

There’s nothing new here for those that have studied the myth, but it’s a concise debunking and useful for reference.

Voynich MS

14 August 2019

Lisa Fagin Davis, an actual expert on the manuscript, has an excellent article in the Washington Post on the Voynich manuscript and how people keep proposing crackpot ideas about it. She gives no solutions or answers to the as-yet-undeciphered work, but she provides some excellent commentary on the misuses of medieval history.

Reinhold Aman (1936–2019)

14 March 2019

Reinhold Aman died earlier this month. Aman was one of the leading experts on profanity and the publisher of the journal Maledicta (“The International Journal of Verbal Aggression”), which ran from 1977–2005).

He was also, shall we say, an interesting character. He was, at one point, imprisoned for sending threatening material to his ex-wife, her lawyer, and the judge who handled the divorce case. I must say, however, that in my few dealings with him, he was always quite polite and gracious.

Jesse Sheidlower has penned an obit.