Articles from: Upenn.edu
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"Slav-ishly devoted"
Mark Liberman, Upenn.edu
In an interview yesterday, Ty Cobb (the lawyer, not the baseball player) answers a question from Geoff Bennett: GEOFF BENNETT: How do you assess the way President Trump in his second term has asserted control over the Justice Department and many of the prosec…
Sep 28, 2025, 11:01 PM
"Is the decline of writing making journalism dumber?"
Mark Liberman, Upenn.edu
No. At least, there've been plenty of dumb articles over past decades and centuries, and plenty of smart ones recently. But I have some complaints about one particular recent article in The Economist, "Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As peop…
Sep 6, 2025, 1:11 PM
"Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms"
Mark Liberman, Upenn.edu
Several people have asked me about this paper — Maya Inbar, Eitan Grossman, and Eyelet Landau, "A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms", PNAS 8/19/2025: Intonation units (IUs) are a hypothesized universal building block of h…
Sep 1, 2025, 5:09 PM
…"wasted little time VERB.ing"…
Mark Liberman, Upenn.edu
Commenters noted the ambiguity of this sentence quoted earlier today in "Rococo": When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. From Bob Ladd: "I was genuinely uncertain when I read the sentence about …
Jul 6, 2025, 6:38 PM
Rococo
Mark Liberman, Upenn.edu
Feargus O'Sullivan. "Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy. But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo.’", Bloomberg 7/3/2025: The US president’s taste for gilded decor is often dismissed with comparisons to an ornate European style of the 18th century. But the real Rococo…
Jul 6, 2025, 3:20 PM