A new blog, The Language Guy, describes itself as “Commentary on how language is used and abused in advertising, politics, the law, and other areas of public life. You can think of it as a linguistic self defense course in which you and I prepare ourselves to do battle with the forces of linguistic evil.” The author, Mike Geis, says of himself:
After receiving a B. A. in philosphy from Rice University, I moved on to M.I.T. where modern theoretical linguistics was brought into being by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and others. After receiving my Ph.D., I worked at the University of Illinois for five years and then left to teach and do research at The Ohio State University until I retired in 1995. Perhaps because of my early interest in philosophy, I switched my focus from theoretical linguistics to more humanistic pursuits, applying what I had learned as a theortical linguist to such areas as advertising, politics, journalism, the law, and conversation. I wrote “The Language of Television Advertising,” “The Language of Politics,” and “Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction.” I also wrote and consulted on linguistic issues arising in such legal domains as trademark law, deceptive advertising, and jury instructions in death penalty cases.
An interesting background, and it promises to be an interesting blog; it started off with an entry on what linguistics is and why people study it, and has continued with analyses of forms of speech like “I don’t mean to X” (which is invariably followed by doing precisely X). Welcome to Blogovia, Mike!
(Via the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
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