It seems as though every time I’m directed to the Huffington Post, it’s to see an article that someone was complaining about. My most recent trip was no different, as I was directed to an article about “Words Almost Everyone…

There’s an unfortunate tendency to believe that we are the inheritors of a Golden Age of Punctuation, and that people today are ruining it with their errant apostrophes, unnecessary quotation marks, and overabundant ellipses. I consider it unfortunate for two…

I hope you’ll excuse a little anecdote here. I’ve been meaning to tell this story, but I haven’t encountered anyone who I could tell it to*, so I’ll inflict it upon you. The anecdote presupposes that you know about the…

Okay, it’s National Punctuation Day again, everyone’s favorite registered trademark of a holiday. (Its inventor really trademarked it, and carefully repeats the ® symbol after each mention of the day.) These manufactured holidays are rubbish, and this one’s just an…

I’m going back to the well of madness that is the Queen’s English Society. You might remember them for the savaging they received at the hands of Stan Carey, John E. McIntyre, and David Mitchell. A brief summary: they’re a…

Every time I mention the no-sentence-final-prepositions rule as an example of unfounded prescriptivism, I always get a response from someone along the lines of “Oh, no prescriptivist actually believes that anymore.” I assure you some still do. Others have rejected…

I saw this interesting headline on Google News recently: “DEA seeks Ebonics experts to help with cases“. And since an old friend and recent commenter had put African-American Vernacular English/Ebonics (I’ll just call it AAVE) in my mind, the story…

Here are two sentences from pages 394-5 of Paul Lovinger’s The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style, sentences that come just after Lovinger quoted five examples of a newspaper columnist’s use of a certain word — a…

A few days ago, John McGrath, Wordnik’s Director of Product Development, sent me a link to the preview version of Wordnik’s new thesaurus feature.  Wordnik, if you’re not familiar with it, is an online dictionary that integrates information from traditional dictionaries…

Fitzedward Hall is an amazing fellow. “Was”, that is; he’s dead now, of course, as amazing fellows too often are. I recently became acquainted with an old book of his, Recent Exemplifications of False Philology, thanks to Google Books. The…

The World Cup’s over now, but there’s a little point that’s keeps gnawing at me. I followed the World Cup primarily through Yahoo!’s sports site (previously mentioned for its poor choices in headline truncation), and I have to admit that…

Last month, we grammar bloggers were all abuzz about the Queen’s English Society and their quixotic quest for the instatement of an academy to regulate the English language. The Society have already been clobbered by Stan Carey, Mark Liberman, John…

Sarah Palin is back in the news for matters linguistic. I’ll only briefly summarize the issue here; given the strange belief by media and Internet folks that Sarah Palin’s doings are somehow significant*, I assume that by the time you’re…

The Fourth of July found me, like any stereotypical red-blooded American male, in front of a grill cooking meats during the day and in the living room playing Cranium once night set in. The game was going well, in that…

One of the fun things about dialectical differences in English is how the poetry turns out. There are some rhymes that just wouldn’t work in your own dialect of English, but work fine in another. For instance, the way I…

It looks like CNN credulously spit out another story from Global Language Monitor (GLM). Basically, GLM did their usual thing of running a speech (in this case, Obama’s oil spill speech from mid-June) through some mindless statistics, getting out the…

I imagine you international readers might be slightly surprised by this, what with my being an American and all, but I get pretty excited for the World Cup. Sure, in my rankings of footballs, I’d put association football below American,…

A while ago, I was scanning through recent entries on a stolidly prescriptivist grammar blog. It’s a blog that I occasionally mine for grammar myths to debunk, and while there I noticed that they had switched off comments on all…

At the bus stop where I catch the campus shuttle each morning, there are two benches, each of which usually has an ad on it. One of the benches has an ad right now that I find to be grammatically…

[Yikes! It's been more than a month since I last posted; I'm sorry for the silence. I'm working on officially becoming a master of arts, and also coming up with a dissertation proposal, and those don't leave a lot of…

Ooh, what an exciting pair to be discussing — the two emotions that jointly account for about 65% of all Gossip Girl storylines! But wait! Are they two emotions? Or are they two words for the same emotion? Some people…

I know it’s become common over these last few posts for me to discuss etymological fallacies, but that’s only because they’re so easy to disprove. They’re like a little vacation for me, a pathetic little vacation I take without moving…

I like reading the Economist. I had a subscription to it when I was back in college and someone had moved away from my dorm without sending them a forwarding address. (I also had a subscription to Newsweek,…

I feel like this past month more and more people have mentioned to me their belief that languages either do or should strive to be logical. On the one hand, this is an obvious point. A more logical language is…

Apparently sentential adverbs are a secret. An open secret, of course, which explains why almost everyone knows about them and uses them regularly. Everyone, of course, except prescriptivists. I already talked about this regarding prescriptivists’ insistence that hopefully can’t be…

Every time National Grammar Day comes around, I’m struck with a spot of dread. Any of my friends or acquaintances might, at any moment, spring upon me and shout “Hey! It’s totally your day! So don’t you hate when people…

A few months ago, I received John McWhorter’s new book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, in the mail and I rapidly and rapaciously read through it, enjoying myself all the while. The best part of the book is not, as…

Having noticed my pants fitting a bit too snugly, and having foolishly counted the number of times I ate at the combination Taco Bell/KFC in one week (around 4), I have recently been considering trying to get into shape. (My…

When I was talking about sentential hopefully, I said that hopefully meaning “in a hopeful manner” had pretty much fallen out of my idiolect. It turns out I was wrong.  I would definitely say this headline, “Obama Speaks Hopefully of…

At the turn of the new year, I wrote post about Tom Torriglia, who’d managed to get a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle stating his opposition to pronouncing the year 2010 as “two thousand ten”. Torriglia, as it…

A few posts ago, I was talking about the sentential-modifier meaning of hopefully, or in non-linguist speak, hopefully in the sentence: (1) Hopefully I’ll be able to escape from the dungeon this afternoon. This is not the original meaning of…