According to Wikipedia, "Cilantro is the Spanish word for coriander, also deriving from coriandrum. It is the common term in North American English for coriander leaves, due to their extensive use in Mexican cuisine." which is consistent with my usage: the fresh leaves and stems are "...

Thank you for the New Yorker quote; very apropos. I'm afraid we can expect a great deal more loucheness (I did it!) for the next few years.

People usually mimic the speech community in which they grew up. Are you sure there is no one in your family who pronounces these words as you do? Who were your care-givers until age 5? Was there a grandmother or another family member who came from a different part of the country? You can try to fig...

Have you tried signing up with a new name (e.g. formerlyLukejavan) with a new email address?

Odaijini

"cuddy" seems to be alive and well in the nautical sense. I have always understood it to refer to a small enclosure on a boat and that meaning is re-enforced by various dictionaries. After that, "barn burner" and "farmer's match" are synonyms although I have never heard...

We all heard that on the first day of our first linguistics class: "Yet the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that speakers are unaware of . . . . [It] is parallel to knowing how to walk without understanding or being able to explain the neurophysiologic...

Here's an interesting article critical of Chomsky's hypothetical Language Acquisition Device.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -learning/

Dear Dr Beard, I just read your piece on "Why the system is broken" in your local paper. You state that "Democrats never had two (or even one) Attorneys General sent to prison." Until now. Admittedly it is a STATE Attorney General and she's not in prison yet, but it IS happening ...

Good question. I trawled around on the internet and read various ideas. Apparently, the first use of 'hypotenuse" was in an English translation of Euclid by Henry Billingsley in 1570. He was apparently transliterating Euclid's Greek term. In other sources, people point out that the other two si...

According to the Oxford dictionary accessed though the "Search 1065 online dictionaries at once" on the top page of alpha Dictionary dot com website, it is defined as "The smallest bit" and the etymology is described as "Early 19th century: of unknown origin. The word is als...

From the NYTimes
"HCFCs are not currently widely used in the United States and production and import here were largely freezed last year."

Is "freeze" being regularised? None of the dictionaries I consulted offer "freezed" as an alternate to "frozen"

When I read this piece a few days ago on the Times' website, I though this use of -self was blow back from Indian English, but I didn't have any data. I've since looked around and it seem to be a feature of what we might call polite Colonial English. The letter at the link http://www.ashanet.org/pro...

"a way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."