A cop film for grammar nuts?

Who would have thought they'd make a police film for grammar aficionados? I haven't seen it yet, so I can't make a recommendation, but today's New York Times has an intriguing review of Police, Adjective. I must confess I'm a bit skeptical of how well a film that focuses at least in part on language could fare through the subtitling process, but we'll see.

Another Word of the Year: admonish

Another word, this one coming to us from the folks at Merriam-Webster, has won Word of the Year honors. It's "admonish," a word that resulted in thousands of online lookups after the U.S. House admonished one of its members for calling President Barack Obama a liar during a presidential speech.

That doesn't seem like a word most people would need to look up — but I must confess, I was one of them. I did so for the same reason many others likely did, not to find out its basic meaning, but to see if it had some fine legal distinction to differentiate it from words such as "censure" or "condemn."

The runners-up in the Merriam-Webster "competition" were mostly ones that were also tied to current events: emaciated, empathy, furlough, inaugurate, nugatory, pandemic, philanderer and repose. I'm not sure where "nugatory" came from; it refers to something inconsequential or ineffective.

How our language may affect how we think

This feature by Robert Krulwich points to an interesting study by a Stanford professor in which native German and Spanish speakers were asked to give words that describe bridges. The Germans describe used words such as "elegant" and "fragile," while Spanish speakers used words such as "strong" and "sturdy."
Why the difference? The theory of the prof, Lera Boroditsk, is that the German speakers have one image because German noun for "bridge" is feminine, while in Spanish the noun is masculine.
I don't know what to make of the argument, but it is interesting.