A lot has been said and written about India’s linguistic diversity and about our love for the English language. I have seen Indians being described as slaves of the British or slaves of the English language. I have heard them being accused of harbouring an absurd fascination (/fetish) for English. Not content with attacking Indians for their weird fascination for foreign imports, people then continue on to dissing English, calling it backward, stupid, regressive, and a dozen other adjectives that aren’t even defined over the domain of languages as far as linguistics is concerned.

A couple of days ago, I saw the Olive Oil/Baby Oil meme resurfacing on Facebook. For those not familiar with it, it shows the image of a rather shocked looking baby with the caption If olive oil is made of olives, then… what is baby oil made of? My heart goes out to the baby, because compound nouns in English can be very very tricky. There is no standard form for interpreting the meaning of a compound noun X-Y.

Today, Linguistrix turns one year old. It’s been a great journey, and I have always enjoyed posting on this blog. I know that posting frequency has reduced in the past few months, but I will try to raise it and bring the blog back to how it was earlier. I have a few things planned for celebrating Linguistrix’s birthday. First off, I am doing an AMA about linguistics and languages on Reddit.

When I was a kid, there was this joke that I often read in one of those magazines for children (I think it was Champak). It was rather lame, but I realized a few days ago that it presented a rather nice analogy of the raging debate between prescriptivism and descriptivism that goes on in academic circles (about language) and so I present an adapted version: One day, two friends (a prescriptivist and a descriptivist) are walking inside a forest, when they suddenly realize that a fierce looking lion has been stalking them and looks like it’s about to attack them.

The latest XKCD reads: The first part is a reference to the cheesy pick-up line ‘If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put U and I together’. The irregularity of the English spelling system is part of folk-lore now. You have countless poems and articles and whatnots, all trying to hammer in the fact that English pronunciation is the work of the Devil. English wasn’t always this way. Let’s travel through time to the 14th century and listen to a recitation of the General Prologue to Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in Middle English.

About a month ago, I wrote an open letter to the Hindustan Times in which I criticized their Sunday columnist Karan Thapar for often putting together his columns based on boring email forwards full of banalities. It was almost as if his grandson (assuming he has one) wrote those columns based on whatever the funniest joke in his kindergarten class was. I say this because I think it was around 1st standard that the ‘P.

Word Rage is a common phenomenon that particularly affects the intellectual community, whose members apparently can’t convince themselves of their intellectuality unless they swear bodily harm against people who use words they don’t like or misplace apostrophes or other sundry stuff. It also serves as a classic ad-hominem tactic—if you can’t find any sensible counter-argument to someone’s claims, criticize his spelling or usage instead and pat your back for a job well done.

I recently answered a question on Quora that is also relevant for this blog, so I am posting it here. When speaking to someone who does not seem to be a fluent English speaker, should I “dumb down” my diction and vocabulary, or is that condescending and presumptuous?{#__w2_mw0UOKH_link} My answer It is very easy to make your speech easier to understand to the listener without ‘dumbing’ it down. Humans anyhow unconsciously accommodate their speech 1 to suit their listener.

Dear Hindustan Times, I will jump straight to the point. Why does Karan Thapar get to fill precious center-page real estate of the Sunday newspaper with content found in boring email forwards? I mean, I know it’s your editorial decision and all, but I had expected that you’d give more value to your Sunday center-page, otherwise filled with useful and interesting content. You know, if you want your readers to read fascinating and funny stuff about the English language taken from the Web, I would suggest reprinting any of Language Log’s posts instead of the mindless drivel that you let KT write just because, well, he’s KT.

A pic was shared like crazy on Facebook in the last few weeks— This comic is factually incorrect, but it’s a good demonstration of how most people are confused about what actual Active and Passive voice is, and mostly just assume it to be random rearrangement of words. In the comic, the teacher asks the students to give examples of Active Voice and Passive Voice. The smartass kid replies with two lines from the song _Tere mast mast do nain_ from the movie Dabangg, thereby also complimenting his teacher’s eyes.