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Leo Deener

Minutia Matters
Features

Minutia Matters: No worries if not

By Leo Deener | December 5

Here’s a text I recently sent to my roommate, who I’ve known since freshman year and spend every day with: “Hey wanna get dinner, NWIN.” I have a serious case of the “no worries if not” disease. I catch myself saying it throughout the day in conversations with friends or in emails with professors, and I’ve come to hate it. “NWIN” has even become a part of how I text my friends along with “WYA” or “LOL.”

Minutia Matters
Columns

Minutia Matters: English rights au Québec

By Leo Deener | November 13

I spent the long Veterans Day weekend in Montréal, Québec to escape the polarized, chaotic politics of my country, the U.S. I ended up finding the same thing there but with a fascinating linguistic flavor. While walking around the city and enjoying overpriced coffee and baked goods, I kept seeing political campaign signs that read, “Elevating Educational Heights Defending English Rights.”

Minutia Matters
Columns

Minutia Matters: Baseball, semantic narrowing and language shift

By Leo Deener | October 24

The New York Yankees, my favorite team, won the American League Championship Series on Saturday and are therefore heading to the World Series. As right fielder Juan Soto caught the final out that sent them to the World Series, the announcer proclaimed that the Yankees had won the pennant for the first time in 15 years. What the hell is a pennant? 

Minutia Matters
Columns

Minutia Matters: The beauty of the impersonal sentence

By Leo Deener | October 10

While hanging out with a friend the other day, I was on one of my long rants about something I was frustrated with. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember complaining about someone and saying something like, “You can’t just do that!” I was, of course, referring to whoever was bothering me, but my friend seemed insulted. His facial expression changed, and I could see an eye roll beginning to form. Before I could correct the semantic misunderstanding that had occurred, I realized I had stumbled upon an interesting linguistic phenomenon that I wanted to talk about in this week’s column.

Minutia Matters
Columns

Minutia Matters: Symbolic connections.

By Leo Deener | September 26

My friend Owen cannot stop talking about “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” (2019), a book about logician Kurt Godel, artist M.C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach. But really, Owen says the book is about the construction of significant context — like a written piece of music built from seemingly meaningless notation marks on paper. 

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