Today, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, which involves a teenager who was suspended after unfurling a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-sanctioned event.

I am something of a creature of habit, and therefore will stick to the same blogs for a long time. Lately though, I've been trying to expand my reading, and so I've been following links from the sites I frequent to language-oriented sites that I haven't visited before.

In the process, I have discovered

1) Language Log really needs to update their links. At least half the sites on their sidebar are defunct.

Creative Commons has just released version 3.0 of their license, and I have relicensed everything on this site (apart from the out-of-copyright stuff, which remains public domain) with this latest license. Unless you're planning to reuse my material, that will be of no interest to you, but it does give me a chance to praise the good folks at Creative Commons for their invaluable work promoting the ideals of free culture.

Almost everyone was taught in school to avoid using the passive voice. Fewer know how to identify the passive voice, but I'm going to assume for the moment that you are part of the elite who can and ask you to do a little grammatical analysis with me.

This discussion of Grammar Taliban reminds me of a mondegreen that I heard a young cousin of my wife utter last summer when we were visiting Malaysia.

Said cousin had heard us singing Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song to our son by way of a lullaby, and so whenever he would start fussing, she would pipe up with

"Come, Mr. Taliban, tally me bananas"

Sally Thomason has been championing a kind of humane prescriptivism, which is surely a bit unusual for the crew at Language Log, but I have a great deal of sympathy.

In the context of language-arts education, a certain prescriptivism is unavoidable. There is a written standard, like it or not, and there are social consequences to violating the standard in certain contexts.

Mark Liberman at Language Log was kind enough to comment on my last post on the expression "Democrat Party."

He makes the point that noun modifiers are recognized in some varieties of traditional grammar, citing the extremely popular 19th-century grammarian Samuel Kirkham as an example.

An interesting article in today's Los Angeles Times about the 'Democrat majority,' a phrase that has apparently been used for years, albeit intermittently, by certain Republicans. The story's author, Maura Reynolds, has apparently done her homework. She even cites a 1957 article from American Speech on its use in the 1950s.

This is a word that deserves more attention.

Two different senses show up in different on-line dictionaries.

The Urban Dictionary defines it as a small piece of excrement floating alone in a toilet bowl. That's a fairly prosaic instance of derivation, just the dimminutive -let tacked on to crap.

A colleague passed on a three-way e-mail exchange discussing the difference between hang and hung.

By itself, that isn't all that interesting. The usage guides all give more or less the same instructions. This explanation from The American Heritage Dictionary is typical: