Since my first From the Field, I've lacked the imagination to wrangle a post the language blogs, even though I find them more interesting (and fun) than articles from scholarly journals. I'd read few articles on Language Log, sigh sadly, and then resort to online catalogs of articles.
For whatever reason, today I refused to sigh sadly and spent most of the afternoon reading about the interwebs. From Language Log, I hopped over to Language Hat and read some good stuff there, including an interesting study, reviewed in the NYTimes, about labelling different "aliens" as friendly or unfriendly and the impact of the results on the Sapir-Whorf debate. I didn't want to devote my post to it, though, so I kept hopping*. Finally, I read an entry which described a really cool manifesto from the blog of a copy editor named Dan. His point of view is interesting, because while he's more of a language relativist, his job requires slightly more prescriptivism.
Here's his blog: http://www.ourboldhero.com/edit/index.html
And here's a post where he details the delicate balance he has to manage between his philosophy of language and his job: http://www.ourboldhero.com/edit/2007/10/please-leave-this-to-professionals.html
And I learned about the word ideolect (pronounced ID-ee-o-lekt): the term used to designate the idiosyncratic speech of individual peopleā??an idiolect is a one-person dialect, unique in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.
Tada!
*Today's journey through language bloggery as I've described it looks pretty linear and lame, but in reality, I branched out from Language Log by opening about 15 other blogs in tabs and repeated the process several times in new pages, branching out all over the place (try doing that on Wikipedia someday, and you'll find yourself staring at a picture of a tesseract rotating on a single axis for a REALLY long time at 4 o'clock in the morning) . Many of the entries I came across were "which way is the correct way to write this?" or stories about new words that I couldn't figure out how to make an entire post about. And lots and lots of Google stats. Linguists love Google stats.