Yann LeCun's evaluation of political versus linguistic errors:   View on Threads   His comment is no doubt meant as a joke, but it's worth exploring the usage that bothers him. To start with, the English word plummet has already been on a long morpho-syntactic and semantic journey (like nearly all other words). It started […]

I've been saying "Erin go Bragh" my whole life and knew that it meant roughly "Ireland Forever!". It's actually an anglicized version of the Irish language phrase "Éire go brách" or "Eire go bráth," which may be translated as "Ireland till doomsday". The term brách is equivalent to "eternity" or "end of time", meaning the […]

This is something I've been waiting for for decades: "Onomatopoeia Odyssey:  How do animals sound across languages?", by Vivian Li, The Pudding (March, 2025) For many, our first memories of learning animal sounds include the song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The song has been translated into at least 25 languages, and a curious finding […]