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Congress may be getting dumber, but grade levels don’t prove it A news story’s making the rounds this week that the members of the U.S. Congress have stopped talking at an 11th-grade level and have started talking at a 10th-grade level. This fits very neatly into the overall feeling that America… |
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Congress may be getting dumber, but grade levels don’t prove it A news story’s making the rounds this week that the members of the U.S. Congress have stopped talking at an 11th-grade level and have started talking at a 10th-grade level. This fits very neatly into the overall feeling that America… |
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Can we all admit none of us know what we’re talking about? First off, if you haven’t already heard, the AP Stylebook finally dropped its objection to sentential hopefully (i.e., the “it is hoped” meaning), thanks in no small part to John McIntyre’s agitation. Another shibboleth bites the dust, hooray. If you’re… |
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Using “since” If you’re a native speaker of English, you are no doubt familiar with two meanings of since, which I’ll refer to as the “time” usage (1a) and the “reason” usage (1b): (1a) Bob Patel has owned and operated the beach… |
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Like setting a fire and wondering why it burns Jonathon Owen of Arrant Pedantry fame tweeted a link to this piece at the New York Daily News.* It’s a discussion of the online open letter that George Zimmerman put up, explaining his current situation and asking for contributions to… |
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On (American) mootness What is a moot point? I can’t think of a time I’ve seen it used to mean anything other than “previously decided” or “debatable only as an academic exercise”. And yet I’ve recently been encountering people claiming that this is… |
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Can descriptivism and prescriptivism coexist? The terms descriptivism and prescriptivism get thrown around a lot, and it seems most everyone says one of the words with a sort of dripping scorn that wouldn’t be out of place on the word “Communist” in the Army-McCarthy hearings.… |
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A nice and natural singular “they” from Community I’m a huge fan of NBC’s show Community, and over the last few months I’ve managed to get my entire family and core friends into it as well. That means going back and watching old episodes over and over again,… |
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Am I disinterested or uninterested in this debate? I’m a little surprised that I’ve been blogging for almost five years now and never got around to talking about whether there’s a difference between the words disinterested and uninterested. I suppose I’ve avoided it because the matter has already… |
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Metapost: The results of a busy fortnight It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, friends, and things are only going to speed up, because I’m currently sitting in the San Diego airport, waiting to jet off to the Big Apple for the CUNY conference on sentence processing,… |
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National Grammar Day 2012: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked It’s National Grammar Day, so as usual, I’m taking the opportunity to look back on some of the grammar myths that have been debunked here over the last year. But before I get to that, let’s talk briefly about language… |
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What’s the deal with “compose” and “comprise”? Compose and comprise seem like mischievous brothers who are opposites but masquerade as each other to fool their friends. They’re very similar — both handle parts-to-whole relationships — yet they’re mirror images in how they handle it. The standard division… |
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Sometimes the subjunctive matters. That won’t stop it dying. The English subjunctive may well be dying, but I am shedding no tears for it. This unconcern is, perhaps, a minority view amongst men of letters, for whom saying if I were instead of if I was is often a… |
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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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