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Lane Greene Profile picture
Lane Greene
@lanegreene
Language columnist and Spain correspondent at The Economist. Author of WRITING WITH STYLE: The Economist Guide.
May 12, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A great thread (in Portuguese) on the idea of "untranslatability", via the famous Portuguese "saudade".

He makes two main points. 1) yes, there's no single word that covers every meaning of "saudade" but that's true for so many words. 1:1 translatability is rarer than you think "Key" in English can be a musical key, a physical one, a modifier meaning "important" ("key point", etc). These will require different translations, but that doesn't make "key" some fancy ineffable word.
Oct 11, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The passive voice gets so much misguided, clueless criticism that many commentators have taken a sort of anti-anti-passive stance, including me at times. Herewith, a reminder that the passive really can be weaselly and unfair. Short thread: I’ve annotated the verbs with a clear agent in these passages about the Spanish civil war. Blueish is active, reddish is passive. Yellow are agentless constructions we might call pseudo-passive (but not the actual passive voice).
Jul 8, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
There's a lot of this about, when you look.

lincs.police.uk/news-campaigns… The NHS staff? Man, you have to *really* want to fight to racially abuse a nurse.
mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/n…
Jul 7, 2021 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
So it was just a 50-100 fans blocking the road celebrating when someone noticed my shirt, called out to his friends, and a dozen started pounding on the bus window, giving me the finger, jeering, two-finger salute, the rest, as my 9yo and wife started getting nervous. I did the wrong thing, which is walk over to the open door and say "congratulations guys, you won, your team played the better game." This drove what I can only call a mob into a frenzy that will depress me far more than the runt who came up & punched me when I couldn't see him.
Mar 10, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Most people are never taught the difference between syntax and semantics, leading to confusions like the one below. So here is a twitter-sized introduction. Syntax is how sentences are put together; what words do in a *structure*. "Semantics" is about *meaning*. 1/ In "The boy ate the apple", the boy is the *subject*, and "ate the apple" is the predicate, in which "the apple" is the direct object. That's the syntax.
Nov 13, 2018 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
1/ Why do we keep getting our knickers in a twist and our logic in a knot over the nature of language? We do we want to control it so badly, and why will that never work? In fact, what do we really talk about when we talk about language? And why did even Orwell get it wrong? 2/ When we're wrong about how language works, we tend to repeat those mistakes elsewhere. Sensible and well-meaning people doggedly persist with muddled thinking. This is a problem not just for linguistics but for society in general. Tribalism, rumor, fake news...
Nov 2, 2018 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Let’s talk about language on quality TV shows. I just finished “Killing Eve”, and can’t stop thinking about it. I loved so many things. I’m going to watch it again. But it loses a star (for 4 out of 5) for the language thing. Spoilers! /1 I wanted to love this show because I love Phoebe Waller-Bridge and “Fleabag” so much I’d watch her read the phone book for eight episodes. I’d watch her eat a bowl of spiders. /2