Vance and Moore… back when both of them were younger Every day, it seems, I read something by or about two of our distinguished politicians: J.D. Vance and Wes Moore. Well, one of them is distinguished; the other is, well… what are the appropri…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/03/11/v...
#Vance #Moore

The Dry This is not a review. More of a warning, I suppose. The reason it’s not a review is that I can’t write one for a book that I didn’t finish, and I didn’t even come close to finishing Jane Harper’s d…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/03/08/t...
#books #bookssky #JaneHarper #TheDry

Taunton vs. Colmar? Several decades ago — at this point I don’t remember exactly how many — I was traveling in France and happened to stop in Strasbourg and Colmar because of recommendations in a guidebook. These two …

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/03/04/t...
#France #Colmar

Everything you wanted to know about the Great Vowel Shift but were afraid to ask Odds are that you studied a European language back in high school — most likely Spanish or French, possibly German or Italian — and you quickly realized that the vowels in those languages are not p…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/02/08/e...
#lindguistics #GreatVowelShift

Streets of Minneapolis Visit the post for more.

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/28/s...

#ICE #Minneapolis #Bruce #Springsteen

Definitely a bonded pair Visit the post for more.

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/25/d...
#cats #BondedPair

Who’s better at understanding written English — you or some random teen in South Korea? Statistically speaking, as a reader of this blog, you are most likely a native speaker of English, so surely you must understand written English better than a random South Korean teen. Right? Well,…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/22/w...
#Korea #AcademicPressure #SouthKorea

Will the real John McWhorter please stand up? (No, no, that’s not the real one; that’s the AI John McWhorter!) John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University who is both a professional linguist and a popular linguist. In other words, he writes both for his colleagues and for the general…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/18/w...
#McWhorter #ArtificialIntelligence #AI

They understand us across the pond. Trump claims that the USA has regained the respect of everyone across the globe, but the Marsh Family knows the truth:

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/11/t...
#trump #MarshFamily

A note from Langston Hughes to my dad Seventy years ago the great Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes penned this inscription in the front of my dad’s copy of Hughes’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. (Note that Hughe…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/10/a...

#LangstonHughes #MiltonMeltzer #BlackHistory #HenryDavidson

Enough is enuf. This book would have made an excellent New Yorker article. But a whole book? Not so much. All right, I suppose many a New Yorker article does feel like an entire book — but Enough is Enuf by Gabe H…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/08/e...
#linguistics #spelling

Is Modern Hebrew a conlang? So I keep seeing references to posts on Reddit…and I always ignore them. But then I said to myself, “Why not give Reddit a chance? What’s there to lose?” That led me to sign up for a few subr…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/06/i...
#linguistics #Hebrew #conlangs

Friends with words Yes, you read that correctly: the title really is Friends with Words, not the more familiar phrase Words with Friends. And even the correct phrase, Friends with Words, has at least two meanings (th…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2026/01/04/f...
#books #booksky #linguistics #language #AWayWithWords #MarthaBarnette #GrantBarrett

This year’s traditional Christmas dinner In accordance with long-established tradition, Barbara and I went to Chau Chow yesterday for a delicious Christmas feast: beef noodle, Chinese broccoli, har gao, shumai, xiao long bao, shrimp paste…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/12/26/t...
#christmas #ChauChow #ChineseFood

Where are you dining today? Visit the post for more.

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/12/25/w...

#christmas #hanukkah #chanukah

Claude predicts the future of English. Recently I’ve been playing with Claude AI, so I asked it (him? are we personifying AI’s these days?) to predict how English will change over the next 600 years. (Why 600? Because Middle English was…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/12/24/c...
#linguistics #english #AI #Claude

A Chanukah carol (in Yiddish) Visit the post for more.

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/12/21/a...
#Chanukah #Hanukkah #Yiddish

Two pop linguists who are worth listening to… and whose videos nevertheless share one particular flaw. I’m talking about Julie Maksimova, better known as Julingo, and Dr. Taylor Jones, better known as Language Jones. You can see what they’ve b…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/12/17/t...
#linguistics #languages #julingo #LanguageJones

“A language I love is…” What took me so long? Today I learned about a new-to-me linguistics blog and podcast called “A language I love is…” This blog has been around since June of 2020, and the podcast since 2023, so I ce…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/12/05/a...

#languages #linguistics #DannyBate #podcasts #blogs

Language city: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues in New York The title and subtitle may make this book sound rather esoteric. But in that case they are unintentionally misleading. You don’t have to be a linguist or a cultural anthropologist to enjoy reading …

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/11/26/l...
#books #booksky #linguistics

“So you want a model railroad” — a well-known… okay… not-so-well-known Warner Bros. film from 1955 When you watch a movie made in 1955, you can’t judge it with 2025 glasses. A lot has happened in 70 years! With that caveat, enjoy this short Warner Bros. film. Also keep in mind, as the French say…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/11/22/s...

#Movies #Comedy #WarnerBros #ModelRailroading #CulturalChanges

A slowly dying cause What do you know about Cornwall? Cornish hens, I suppose. And Cornish pasties, but only if you’ve been to Britain. That’s probably it, unless you have an esoteric linguistic interest in the lesser-…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/11/20/a...
#books #booksky #ElizabethGeorge #Cornwall

Three cheers for Jason Jensen — not only a model railroader but also a true American artist! Model railroading is both a craft and an art. My favorite model railroader on YouTube is Jason Jensen, who is #1 as both a craftsman and an artist. Many of his videos are lengthy, but they’re worth…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/11/17/t...
#ModelRailroading #JasonJensen

The new Springsteen bio-pic Your most urgent question (I’m sure) is why did I put a hyphen in biopic. The answer is that I learned recently that a majority of people pronounce biopic to rhyme with myopic! (In other words, the…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/11/11/t...
#Springsteen #TheBoss #Nebraska #DeliverMeFromNowhere

Abby wants more admirers. Visit the post for more.

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/10/24/a...
#cats #TabbyCats

“I am a Jewish man.” —Daniel Cainer As I was thinking about these matters yesterday (for obvious reasons), this popped up in my YouTube feed. Who knows why the algorithm chose it for me. In any case, even though I was never a bar mit…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/10/19/i...
#Jew #Jewish #DanielCainer

No Trump. No Kings. Be sure to turn on closed captioning for this one, so you can see the parts that you can’t hear:

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/10/18/n...
#NoKings #Trump #NoTrump

Triple threat: Carl Sagan, critical thinking, and an exam Carl Sagan. A blast from the past, you’re going to tell me! But not really. As several commenters have pointed out after watching the video linked below, he’s more relevant than ever at this point.…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/10/13/t...
#CarlSagan #CriticalThinking #QuestionAuthority

A Scourge of Vipers My one-word review is “meh.” Bruce DeSilva’s A Scourge of Vipers is not a bad mystery. (There’s litotes for you. You can look it up, as I think I said in my last post in a different context, though…

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/10/03/a...
#books #booksky #DeSilva

Morning glories on a glorious morning Chiasmus here. (You can look it up.)

blog.larrydavidson.com/2025/10/01/m...
#flowers #MorningGlories #chiasmus