Assistant Village Idiot

Originally published December 2011. This one is part of the Billy Sidis series, and not the first one. This is Part II. It is, however, far ...

Talk like a pilgrim , according to the experts at Plimouth Plantation. Actually, we talked like this a lot in the AVI household.  Ben stil...

The song title means "Good Morning."  It is a family joke, as Jonathan uses it as his universal Romanian phrase - not only a gre...

One of the search terms that brought up my site last week was  ზურაბ წერეთელი Yeah, I looked it up and see the connection.  Still pretty f...

Which is correct, to say "Everyone except me," "Everyone, excepting me," "Everyone except I," or "Everyon...

A witty etymology site Bradshaw of the Future , has a negative eval of Ryan and Jetha's Sex At Dawn: the Prehistory Origins of Modern Se...

I am a fan of Steven Pinker's thinking and writing.  Well, the first third of every chapter of his writing, I should say.  I don't k...

Reposted from July 2010. Nothing new to see here, but folks might like the review. Creationism and Politics There are some interesting prac...

Here we go again. Those of you complaining about Rick Perry's pronunciation of nuclear hope, by drawing attention to it, to illustrate...

In English Common Law, you couldn't be tried for a homicide if the person died more than a year and a day after you injured him. A reas...

Geoffrey Pullum states beautifully what I have long thought about The Elements of Style in his Chronicle of Higher Education article, Fifty ...

Kenneth Anderson of Volokh has linked to an essay on the importance of Americans learning foreign languages . I disagree with that more eac...

I have had my own sendups of postmodern and deconstructionist thought, but nothing of the quality of this site . Each time you visit, it ...

Part of what has impressed and worried me about Watson winning at Jeopardy is how difficult context must be to program. A coworker said ...

I just got the joke, years later. Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span sometimes sings with June Tabor under the name "Silly Sisters." S...

A linguistics post that even Jonathan and Ben will like. It had to happen eventually, just by law of averages. Michael too, as his wife fi...

Just a list of boy names that have become girl names. As you can see, this has been going on for some time. Each new one always sounds str...

Hans Kurath did the initial work on a linguistic atlas of the United States in the 1930's. It turned out to be much more involved than ...

The "t" sound is coming back to often after being away for 300 years. When I was younger, I don't think anyone used the pro...