Yeah, I was surprised when I realized I have this book. It’s a rather good one, IMHO, but I wouldn’t say it’s new.
Which they will tell you about ad nauseam. 
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notallveganpoets
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What is going on here? I’ve never noticed this before.
How and why is a font replacing an “f” character with a different graphic when there are two next to each other? Ctrl-F’ing shows that both characters are considered to be the same letter.
Are there any other stylistic substitutions like this?
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fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl are all ligatures in some fonts. A few fancy ones have things like st too. Having them be recognizable as compounds is new to me though, they used to be special characters that wouldn’t come up when searching for a individual component therein.
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I meant when I Ctrl-F’ed for “ff”, pressing the same key twice on my keyboard, the results carried me to those. Sorry for the confusion.
I did not know that. Interesting.
“Ligatures” is a new term to me. Thanks! Looking it up now.
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Everything’s super emphasized, in most American podcasts I listen to. Everything’s more likely to be mega emphasised here in the UK.
Apropos “begs the question”, dictionaries already list both meanings. The ship sailed some time ago. But perhaps “shibboleth” should be added to the list?
America=“super emphasized”; UK=“mega emphasized”.
As a 'Merican, I get the first…but do you mean America doesn’t quite live up to UK standards, or the other way round?
I haven’t emphasized anything in the States for a few years, so I don’t know the super/mega exchange rate offhand.
I’ll be back on the coast of NC next spring, hopefully having a super nice time.
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Irregardless, your fortuitous heading to NC begs the question of whether you will effect the attitude of a nonplussed, meretricious Southern Gentleman…or not.
but have a good time anyways, there’s good surfing down there
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omg, that’s exactly what I do when I hear a word!
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Hmm. How have you been seeing that wrongly used?
Let’s see if I got this right! By proscribing linguistic utilizations that he deems to be ‘incorrect’, Pinker is thereby prescribing a kind of purism of the vocabulary that limits the evolution of language.
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At least among the kind of linguists I generally associate with, it’s regarded as a truism that a linguist should attempt to describe the language, as it is spoken by the people who speak it, rather than try to prescribe how he thinks people should speak it.
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I’m pretty nonplussed that I’ve been using nonplussed wrong…
You write “though in many cases (“begs the question”) I’d argue that the meaning has shifted for the majority of English speakers.” That is not a counterargument to Pinker’s point. He would say that if your assertion is true, it is only because the majority are uneducated and wrong. But that deficiency can be corrected with a decent education.
This is a prescriptivist list, which is not affected by majority usage (aka, deviation from correct usage). It is important to understand where he is coming from.
I confess I haven’t, I was trying to suggest that “begging the question” is a shibboleth. (Clumsily done, alas.)
I think the transitive verb form of affect is partly to blame for the confusion since it means to materially produce an effect upon. For instance, “The stroke affected his ability to speak.”
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That’s not surprising. Ligatures fell out of favor some time ago. Popular san serif fonts rarely include them, software like Microsoft Word disables them by default and browsers don’t show them by default with the exception is Firefox when font sizes above 20 px.
Fun fact about ligatures: the symbol & was actually the ligature for “et” which slowly morphed over the years.
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