Throughout my life, I’ve heard words referring to gay people tossed around as casual insults, often used as weapons against people who are not themselves gays or lesbians (see, for example, the use of “no homo“). It’s behavior like this that…
My post on the gendered use of the word bossy has gotten a lot of attention in the past week. In it, I presented a modest bit of data to support Sheryl Sandberg’s campaign attempting to raise awareness of the obstacles…
Despite the naïve pretensions of utopic meritocracy held by many of the era’s commentators, we now know that the early twenty-first century was one marked by intense inequalities in its inhabitants’ well-being and life opportunities. Indeed, in many ways this era’s incredible…
Recently, public figures like Sheryl Sandberg and Ariana Huffington have been calling attention to the labeling of young girls’ behaviors and particularly how the labels are often differently applied to young girls but not young boys. In particular the word bossy…
In the field of linguistics, we tend to make a distinction between two ways of thinking about language and grammar: prescriptivism and descriptivism.
linguistic pulse 