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.
...moreThe 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 that little dot to go anywhere anytime soon: Bilefsky’s piece — or any long piece without periods — is like a car without brakes. You […]
...moreI 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 them? Any person without an agenda knows the answer is “both.”
...moreThe 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.
...moreFor 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.
...moreThe 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?
...more…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.
...moreIn 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.
...moreOver 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, sometimes to the consternation of copy editors, a number of whom abide by the convention that farther is for literal distance and further for metaphoric distance. I don’t think […]
...moreThe Guardian presents a history of this tantalizing punctuation. They’re irresistible…
...moreAfter having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial comma. Over at the Guardian, Steven Pinker defends his choice to fight the good fight against solecisms. (Lest you presume he prioritizes syntax over diction, check […]
...moreIt’s “whom,” motherfucker. William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style is foundational reading for most aspiring writers. But you’ve never seen it like this. Go check out your new favorite unpublished screenplay, “Strunk & White: The Grammar Police.”
...moreLanguage is a great way to communicate, and an even better way to avoid it altogether. This “Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar” ensures no one will ever decode what you’re really saying.
...moreAt JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu makes a case for emphasizing grammar rules that follow popular usage, rather than the pedantic standards set by centuries-dead classicists. Here are the plain facts: many of these pop grammar rules… were magically pulled out of thin air by a handful of 18th and 19th century prescriptive grammarians…. Often […]
...moreUsing the second person is a tricky but effective writing device, though its use is pretty uncommon. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre offers some clever examples of writing in the second person.
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Author and translator Jay Rubin talks about his new novel, The Sun Gods, translating Haruki Murakami into English, and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
...moreSarcasm on the Internet—you know it when you see it. But how? Without the conversational aids of our best deadpan voices or our fingers as scare quotes, we use all sorts of tricks and mechanics. At The Toast, a linguist points out some of the ways in which we write out sarcasm on the Internet.
...moreLet’s consider that we are seeing a natural movement towards a society in which language is more oral—or in the case of texting, oral-style—where written prose occupies a much smaller space than it used to. As such—might we stop pretending that ordinary people need to be able to write on a level higher than functional? […]
...moreThe Internet loves correcting other people’s grammar. But you’re your grammar mistakes are often the result of how the brain functions rather than ignorance, cognitive scientists have learned. The Washington Post reports that the reason we often end up with homophone errors is that the brain double checks our writing with the way a word […]
...moreFor The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz delves into the history of that short, mysterious word that can function as five or more parts of speech, be its own sentence, and now even reverse its meaning: no.
...moreProving that the quest for high scores on the SAT is as tragically unhip as ever, The Princeton Review is making headlines for setting off a grammar grudge match with pop sensation Taylor Swift. Swift’s lyrics are not only included in a section on pronoun agreement errors, they’re misquoted (although as Eugene Volokh points out […]
...moreMary Norris has a gift for your favorite grammarian in this week’s New Yorker: a detailed account of comma policy from a veteran copyeditor. The magazine is notorious for its meticulous house style (where else do you still see a diaeresis over the word coördinate?), which it owes to Mensa-level punctuator Eleanor Gould and her […]
...moreBryan Henderson has made more than 47,000 edits to Wikipedia. This prolific career is not the product of Henderson’s great breath of knowledge, but rather because he has an obsession with fixing a specific grammatical mistake. The mistake he corrects over and over again is composed of two words: “comprised of.” His efforts to remove […]
...moreTechnically perfect writing is important when it comes to journalism or nonfiction, and especially helpful when writing with short deadlines. Fiction writing is different though. Nicole Bernier, over at Beyond the Margins, explains why grammatically sloppy writing might be the product of greater creativity: Sometimes when creative writers say they don’t notice their own typos, […]
...moreIn his new book The Sense of Style, brain scientist Steven Pinker calls for a relaxation of English grammar rules. While the Daily Beast’s review praises Pinker for rejecting the false dichotomy between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the New Yorker argues that we need rules to communicate. No word yet on using the wrong version […]
...moreEverybody has that one friend who insists they know good grammar. They’re probably wrong—Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker insists strict rules just don’t matter because language is fluid. Mother Jones explains the grammatically anti-authoritarian position: …language is never set in stone; rather, it is a tool that is constantly evolving and changing, continually adding new […]
...moreThe rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively rank those categories. Ever wondered why we order our adjectives the way that we do? […]
...moreEven if you know what is a pronoun and what “gender” means, you’ll want to read this linguistic time-tripping essay on the link that ties the part of speech to the noun class by Gretchen McCulloch over at The Toast.
...moreAdverbs are bad, every writer has been told, repeatedly. Use them sparingly, if at all, is the advice commonly given. But adverbs do serve a purpose, and more often it is misuse, not overuse, that unfortunately taints bad writing. Robin Black, writing at Beyond the Margins, defends the adverb: Adverbs are modifiers. They modify – […]
...moreSentence construction. That’s all a writer does anyhow, right? Not all sentences are made with great care and hold sentiments like this one: There is something artful and sad in juxtaposing the certainty that something is wrong with the uncertainty over what that thing is. Tin House explores the artistic genius tucked away in the sentences crafted […]
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