Writing in the New York Times, David Cohen meditates lyrically upon the differences between British and American English. Cohen uses these differences, especially individual words--loo vs. bathroom, bonnet vs. hood, car park vs. parking lot, etc., as a token of a larger cultural divide. He quotes Victor Katz, noting

There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don't.

One of my recurring frustrations with the way grammar is taught in the K-12 world is that by clinging so tenaciously to books that have not seen any real innovations in syntactic theory since the nineteenth century, teachers wind up with no explanation for many phenomena that occur all the time. A teacher sent me an email with the following question:

I've tried looking this up in every grammar guide I can find, but I haven't found the answer. Consider these two sentences: I bought a car to drive myself to work. I bought an alarm clock to wake me in the morning.

check out this withering critique by Geoff Pullum in The Chronicle of Higher Education. If you're a regular Language Log reader, it won't be news to you. The article generally recapitulates points that Pullum has made on that blog over the last several years.

For my birthday, I received Don Ringe's From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic and I've been reading it while taking the train in to work.

I find that even though I'm not in academia any more it's refreshing to spend some time perusing hard-core historical linguistic geekery, particularly since I've never really delved into PIE with the depth that I should have. I suspect that many Anglo-Saxonists tend to skimp on their study of the linguistic pre-history of English, especially the earliest stages.

Yesterday we took my son Aran, who's now three and a half, to Legoland, where he got to ride his first rollercoaster, since he's now just tall enough for the smaller ones. As we spun around the track, he leaned against me and shrieked with a mixture of trepidation and glee. Afterwards, he proudly told me, "I scrome (/skro:m/) on the roller coaster," a form that made me sit up and take note, as it's an innovative irregular past form of "scream" that I'm pretty sure he came up with himself, although I can't completely rule out the possibility that he heard it at his preschool.