My Tribune language column today:
On the new book "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion," on why animal communication doesn't qualify as language.
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Here's author Steven Anderson's page at Yale. Here's the full text of The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and here's much more on the series. Here's the NYT on Anderson's book. Here's a clip from my story this summer on Rico the dog.

Here's more on the Endings items: First Idea, parrot tongues, and bilingual brains.

Inflections
• As if voting weren't confusing enough, a sign yesterday said "Voting Enterance." (Is that syllable added in common pronunciation? I'm not sure.)

• "These restrooms are for accessible use only," a sign said in a hotel lobby. So I looked for an inaccessible one.

• Manny Ramirez on why the curse of the Bambino didn't stop the Red Sox: "You make your own destination."

• One of Jay Leno's Headlines, from an ad: "Going away? Don't Want To Leave Your Dog In a Canal?" (Sure don't. Wet dogs reek.) He also had an ad for "Frosted Shredded What."

• The NYT: "Music critics have a word for ... this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights.

• I want to look into the transitivity of the verb "quit" in British English versus its American intransitivity: "[Hostage] calls upon Britian to quit Iraq." (There's that line from The Raven: "Leave my loneliness unbroken! Quit the bust above my door!")

• The Trib on people with the last name of Frankenstein.

• Previous column and inflections