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A brief history of speaking about graduation Hiding from my dissertation in a little alcove under the stairs on the bottom floor of the library, I was scanning through a book of grammar gripes. One of them was the common objection to transitive usage of the verb… |
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Plain English and the balance between clarity and aesthetics I was reading through Stan Carey’s recent Macmillan Dictionary post on the 2011 Plain English Campaign awards, and he put together some disparate bits of thoughts that had been floating around my head for years now. I’ve always felt sort… |
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Is there a difference between “verbal” and “oral”? To a linguist, there is an obvious difference between verbal and oral: only the first word can be used to mean “pertaining to a verb”. But for people who don’t talk about parts of speech so often, the more relevant… |
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The hashtag’s not ruining anything. Gizmodo ran an article last week by Sam Biddle, titled “How the Hashtag is Ruining the English Language”. And, as I’ve begun to realize articles titled “How X is doing Y” tend to do, it forgets to explain how exactly… |
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The worst “Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus” headlines of 2011 Today’s post is a bit out of the site’s wheelhouse, but if there’s any day to deviate from your schtick, it’s Christmas. John McIntyre has been tracking some of the hackneyed Christmas constructions that show up in newspaper headlines, like… |
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Ted Leo and the phonetics of “forgotten” It’s nearly Xmas, so I’m feeling like posting something imperceptibly more trivial than usual. In a sometimes effective attempt to block out the Christmas songs being hummed everywhere I go (most of all by my parents, who want to stop… |
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S-Series IV: Beside(s) Let’s continue the S-Series by talking about beside and besides. I’ve heard a lot of people kick up a fuss over these two, but having thought through their usage, I’m rather surprised. I don’t think a lot of native English… |
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The Society Against Grammatical Boobery I became aware of the Society Against Grammatical Boobery in the same way as I’ve learned about everything important over the last year: Twitter. I have good news for all of you for whom the Queen’s English Society has grown… |
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The reason why there’s nothing wrong A couple years ago, frequent commenter and friend of the site Vance Maverick left a comment linking to a mysterious sign located in San Francisco’s Mission District: The sign was brought up as part of a brief discussion of the… |
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Descriptivism isn’t “anything goes” One of the most common claims levelled against descriptivists, and against linguists of every stripe, is that our linguistic philosophy amounts to “anything goes”. Whenever anyone says something, the thought is, we will take it as a valid sentence in… |
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The “amount of” complaints are substantial, but off the mark Is this a valid sentence? I’m running into a ridiculous amount of people at Ala Moana. I found it on Twitter, and I don’t know what Ala Moana is, but let’s press on all the same. My real question is… |
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Is speaking the language all it takes to be an expert? At Lynne Murphy’s long-ago tweeted suggestion, I listened to a debate between Grant Barrett, of A Way with Words, and Matthew Engel, of the BBC article from a few months ago that complained about American usages infecting British English. Through… |
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Your modifier’s misplaced, but mine’s fine I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of David Foster Wallace, but truth be told, my antipathy for his work is less about his writing specifically and more about what I consider a fault of a genre, spanning other… |
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A back-to-school reading list for the linguistically inclined I was recently blindsided by one of the lesser dangers of the quarter system: that everyone else seems to be back in school. Because UC San Diego has three quarters instead of two semesters, I’ll remain out of school for… |
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S-Series III: Toward(s) It’s time for another entry in the intermittent S-Series, which looks at words that exist both with and without an s, and tries to figure out what motivates the choice between the options. Today, we’ll look at toward and towards.… |
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On feeling good, well, bad, or badly Last post, I argued that “I’m good” is a perfectly acceptable response to “How are you?”, because the linking verb am takes an adjective, and good is an adjective. “I’m well” is a fine response as well, although I personally… |
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The “I’m good” outrage is nonsense This is such a common complaint that I’m only going to offer a single example of it, and leave it up to you whether you want to waste part of your life looking up other examples. From the BBC’s idiotic… |
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Introducing SeeTweet Today I’m unveiling a little side project I’ve been doing off and on for the past few months, one that I previewed a bit in last week’s All of what sudden? post. It’s called SeeTweet, and it generates maps… |
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Journalists must be arbiters, not stenographers [I'm betting that many of you readers already have heard enough about the BBC's recent Americanisms article, which was just a list of 50 pet grammar/word peeves supplied by their readers, without any evidence of American origin. Mark Liberman, Lynne… |
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All of what sudden? Today I get to pretend to be a big-time radio DJ, a regular Casey Kasem or Delilah*, by sending out this post by request to Mike Pope, one of this blog’s earliest followers. (If you’ve got a similar simmering question,… |
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Book Review: “Write More Good” is great I jest about the uselessness of Twitter, but I find myself more and more defending it to the people in my daily life, a sure sign that I am crossing over into some sort of addiction that I ought to… |
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How to spell +1′d (or is it +1ed?) Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook, has been generating a ton of buzz in its brief invitation-only phase. That’s about all I know about it; I’ve intentionally been avoiding investigating further. It doesn’t have FarmVille, so what’s the point? But I’m… |
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How many L’s in “cancelled”? I went to buy something the other day using a credit card, but I screwed up somehow and the machine ended up cancelling the transaction. It announced this to me in a message that persisted on the screen for an… |
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A 5% chance of a one-in-a-million word One of my labmates was practicing his talk for an upcoming conference, looking at the predictability of different continuations of a sentence. Showing a logarithmic graph of word frequencies, he remarked that at one end of the scale, the words… |
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“Aggravate” means “irritate” as well According to some people, the first of these sentences is perfectly fine, while the second has a common but nevertheless gutting mistake in it: (1a) His romp through the woods was pleasant enough, but ending up in poison oak again… |
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S-Series II: Backward(s) The S-Series, looking at words that may or may not have an s at the end, has been on something of a hiatus since February’s look at anyway(s). Today, let’s move the series forward by looking at backward and backwards.… |
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Reciprocal battle: “each other” and “one another” Yesterday I re-stumbled upon an old grammar worksheet from David Foster Wallace in which he had his students try to correct sentences that largely didn’t need correcting. I’d first been introduced to it way back in 2009, at which point… |
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Avoiding grammar mistakes is a speed-accuracy trade-off Why do people make grammar errors? In a general sense, errors are of two types: errors of competence and errors of performance. Errors of competence are the easy ones to explain; they’re mistakes made because one doesn’t know the correct… |
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Is changing language tantamount to changing math? The spectre of common usage is one of the greatest bugaboos for amateur grammarians, who fear that if we accept a usage because everybody’s using it, we’re weakening the language. For example: We have often noted that often repeated language… |
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“Yummy mummy” declared a good addition to language Bernard Lamb is at it again. Well, to be precise, he was at it again, because the piece I just found dates back to October. But it’s just as poorly reasoned as anything new, so let’s go back and take… |
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Can’t help but be right I hate when someone starts a monologue by needlessly invoking a dictionary definition for some word. Few openings can ruin a graduation speech faster than “Webster’s defines ‘scholarship’ as …”. (Even the Yahoo! Answers community knows this.) For most common… |
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