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Malarkey, or the New Loose Talk
Ah, the wearin’ of the green. I lay claim to one-quarter Irish blood, which yields the in-group privilege of getting my Irish up when I want to and also provokes delight in Joe Biden’s recent use of...
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Dis and Dat
I’ve just finished grading my first set of persuasive essays this term. True to form, about two-thirds of them ran into trouble, or exposed the trouble into which they’d run, with an unreferenced...
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The Real Thing
I sometimes start my fiction-writing class off with an icebreaking exercise stolen from NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me. I call it “Bluff the Class” (cf. “Bluff the Listener”), and its purpose is to...
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Anthimeria You!
“What verb,” asks Helen Sword in the latest “Draft” column in The New York Times, “describes the act of creating a new verb from another part of speech? Verbify, of course—or, simply, verb.” She’s...
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What a Game
I told myself I was going to take a break from posts about language and politics after the election, but Robert Lehrman’s recent “Draft” column in The New York Times changed my mind. Mr. Lehrman wrote...
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No More Gatekeeping
In an earlier century, I taught at an exclusive four-year college whose English department had a bang-up reputation for producing fine writers. Elders in the department had produced a style manual that...
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Slinging Southpaw Lingo
I broke my right wrist over the Thanksgiving holiday and am clad in a cream-colored cast up to the elbow. Being right-handed, I’m finding it dodgy to correct student papers, grade exams, etc., at the...
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What Do You Mean, ‘We’?
I’m finally following up on a suggestion made some months back by Frank Williams at Eastern Kentucky University, to investigate the proliferation of the first-person plural in what appear to be dubious...
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Speaking of Guns
Here we are again, in the wake of a horrific mass murder 45 minutes from my home, discussing whether or not we can discuss the question of guns. Writing in The New York Times on Saturday, Nate Silver...
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So Much Depends …
A recent post in The Stone, a New York Times blog, has been sitting on my browser for a couple of weeks now, bugging me. I refer to “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” by Ernie Lepore and Matthew...
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Upping the Ante
The origin of a cliché is a bottomless pit on a dark and stormy night, but I was tickled by The New York Times’s recent addition to the trove of lore concerning the whole nine yards. This one is...
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Match-Grade Jargon
My recent column on the language of gun-related legislation seems to have tapped into the zeitgeist. The talking heads now refer mostly to gun violence, and Peter Baker’s recent New York Times column...
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Peeking Under the Lid
My one serious attempt at memoir takes the reader back, as memoirs often do, to my adolescence and coming of age, in the late 60s and early 70s. When the manuscript went through copy-editing, a long...
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Moodling
This is not a rant. We’re all back to the classroom now, and for me that means back to Moodle postings. I am a fan of Moodle postings. For those who don’t use the system—Moodle is an open-access...
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Words: a Time Capsule
People love words. We may not use them adroitly, spell them correctly, or like those who possess larger word-hoards than we, but The New York Times minifeature “That Should Be a Word” draws thousand of...
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ABEABA*
A reader recently suggested a blog post about what he called “creative abbrevs,” the acronym imo (“in my opinion”) being his example. Varieties of texting shorthand live and die as fast as mayflies,...
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What’s in Style
I love reading the New York Times editor Philip Corbett’s After Deadline blog, not so much for the gaffes he’s willing to expose in his weekly “newsroom critique” as for the glimpses he provides into...
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Biodestiny and All That Jazz
Hard-core discussions of gender have their own lexicon, as do hard-core discussions of anything. Like other vocabularies, this one has made its way into broader discourse as the relevant...
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Rockin’ Robin
My mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody...
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The He Stands Alone
You heard it here first. For years, now, language mavens have been discussing the creep of the nominative pronoun in constructions calling for the objective case. Although voices have been raised in...
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