Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured. [Link added]
Yes, there was a time not so long ago that blogs were looked at as pretty uniformly unreliable or, worse, merely a forum for opinion unencumbered by the restrictions of factual information. In fact, that opinion still holds in some places, not always without reason. Nevertheless, these days it is commonplace for writers in mainstream publications to quote one of the (many) good, reliable blogs out there. Language Log is certainly in that category. I identified that years ago when I went about collecting their posts for Far from the Madding Gerund.
No comments:
Post a Comment