Some nice people retweeted my post about being a humble prescriptivist, and I had some interesting reactions in the comments and on Twitter, but Peter Sokolowski had one that I wasn’t prepared for. @ArrantPedantry @grvsmth Those are the descriptivist straw men that everybody's been looking for.

Just So stories were named by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the same name, which contained stories like “How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.” In that one, the rhino’s skin starts out tight, but after he takes it off to swim, a man put crumbs in it to take revenge for the rhino eating his cake. When the rhino put his skin back on, it itched so much he loosened it up with all his scratching.

I realized today that I hadn’t yet blogged about my dissertation, the Spread of Change in French Negation . That’s too bad, because I like my dissertation topic. It’s fun, and it’s interesting. You may see here, from time to time, posts about my dissertation research. I’ll try to make them accessible to anyone, not just the specialized audience that I wrote the dissertation for.

Yesterday Tyler Schnoebelen posted an important warning to anyone who thinks translation is simple, by going through various translations of the quote “the stuff that dreams are made of” from the movie the Maltese Falcon .  Unfortunately it’s even worse than he says, because the official French translation, at least, is not very good. One spring evening when I was in college in Paris I went out to see Casablanca .