What Russian Grammar Taught Me about Death
I wanted to feel in control of something, but I didn’t know how to say that.
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grammar
51 posts
Writing as Construction of the Self: Talking with Matthew Salesses
Matthew Salesses discusses his new novel, DISAPPEAR DOPPELGÄNGER DISAPPEAR.
FUNNY WOMEN #155: Feminine and Masculine Words
A helpful trick can be to picture feminine words (pumpkin latte, duvet cover) as butterflies. Soft, delicate, hard to catch, and useless except near flowers. Masculine words are more like knives.
You’d Prefer Not To
The Internet has been abuzz with grammatically incorrect chatter since the New York Times recently published an article heralding the end of the period. But Flavorwire’s Jonathon Sturgeon doesn’t expect…
You Keep Using That Word
I do not think it means what you think it means: Do words mean what the dictionary says they mean, or do they gain meaning through the way we use…
Weekly Geekery
The government has always been spying on you. Updating the search for immortality. People could judge you for giving bad email. Facebook is not social networking.
The Singular They
For the New York Times, Amanda Hess gives us a brief history of the increasingly prominent and ambiguously-gendered singular they, from usage in Shakespeare to Girls and The Argonauts.
The Great American Typo
The Smithsonian attempts to hunt down its own white whale: why is Moby-Dick hyphenated in the title of the novel but unhyphenated in the text?
For Everybody
…you ask them, ‘Why are you so upset?’, and they can’t answer you. For the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphael talks to linguist David Crystal about our age of abbreviation.
Consider the Ellipsis
In the latest installment of Lexicon Valley over at Slate, Katy Waldman considers how to use an ellipsis with the aid of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.
Away We Go
Over at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain tackles the ambiguity on the use of “farther” and “further” in contemporary writing: Farther or further? I vary them more or less thoughtlessly in my writing,…