Arika Okrent
Linguist, Author, Mental Floss
Arika Okrent is a linguist and author with a joint PhD in linguistics and cognition and cognitive neuroscience from the University of Chicago. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages (2009) and Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme – and Other Oddities of the English Language (2021). She lives in Chicago and covers language for Mental Floss.
Written by Arika Okrent
essay
Language and linguistics
Typos, tricks and misprints
Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology
Arika Okrent
essay
Language and linguistics
Is linguistics a science?
Much of linguistic theory is so abstract and dependent on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to explain
Arika Okrent