languagehat.com

As regular readers will know, I am a sucker for old-fashioned printing — one of the best parts of my job as a proofreader in a printing and design department in the 1980s (do such entities still exist?) was hanging out with printers and listening to them talk about the old days. PrintingFilms.com...

Mark Liberman’s Log post inspired me to discuss the very interesting word solidus ‘slash (mark).’ It developed from the name of a gold coin of the Roman Empire, which g...

RNZ reports on yet another distressing development due to the “AI” craze:

When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner Anne-Marie Thorby smelt a rat. A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book...

My wife and I are watching the tenth season of Shetland (and looking forward to the eleventh, while mourning the recently announced departure of lead actress Alison O’Donnell), and I was delighted to see that one of the characters, a craggy and mysterious poet...

I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas’s LRB review (23 July 2026;