I’m guessing that I’m not such as old a dog as I think — I’ve been learning some new tricks! But … they’re the same old tricks, only different. Language, for example. Lately, I’ve had cause to look ...

We know that words change all the time and over time, a process language experts describe as “semantic shift,” semantics being the field of language concerned with meaning. Even if we may not ...

Traditionally the relation between philosophy and religion has been one either of identity, as in the early Middle Ages, or of hostility, as in the Age of Reason. In the eighteenth and nineteenth ...

The goal of my video project for the course Language in US Society, embedded above, was to emphasize how the meaning of words -especially slang - have adapted beyond having only one meaning through ...

Mamdani understood that voters don’t leave their languages behind when they migrate. They use them to make sense of work, community and politics. By speaking to them in those languages, he showed that ...

YESTERDAY'S post on Cantonese touched a few nerves. A blog post is a very compressed medium, and I said some things briefly that I still stand by but which deserve a bit of elaboration. My calling ...