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Love Me, Don’t Grade Me
When my sons were beginning elementary school, they liked to while away a rainy Saturday afternoon playing school. They wanted me to play the teacher, but apparently I didn’t do it right. “You have to...
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A Three-Hundred-Year-Old Dilemma
Recently The Economist’s “Johnson” column (named not for its author, but for the dictionary pioneer Samuel Johnson, who lived three centuries ago) ruminated on the frustrations and obscure...
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Why a Ham Sandwich?
When my brother and I were teenagers, we liked to practice non sequiturs, irrelevant statements that seemed to beggar any attempt at response. One of our favorites was “My father drives with both...
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‘Alt’ Alternatives
What a world of difference lies between adopting your own moniker and having one thrust upon you. I had never heard the term alt-left before the president used it in his third iteration of comments on...
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Totality
The word totally has grown so overused that I was struck, last week, by the power of its near cousin, totality, describing the two or three minutes, along the arc of the much-heralded solar eclipse,...
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Spelling, Agin
Farhad Manjoo is of the mind that mockery of Donald Trump’s spelling mistakes exhibits elitism. It’s a vexed question that I’ve addressed once before in this forum. There’s no doubt that making fun of...
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I Am Not Resilient
Following close on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, as Hurricane Irma leaves devastation in her wake that now awaits Hurricane Jose, more than a few of us are talking about the relationship of climate...
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The Case Against Flashback
I’ve been thinking, this week, about daydreaming and fiction. A recent article in The Atlantic estimates that people may daydream through nearly half their waking hours. That seems like a lot to me,...
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Doddering Dotards
You know something’s amiss when American social media wax gleeful over a North Korean dictator’s chosen insult for the American president. Last week, Kim Jong-un’s choice of the word dotard to describe...
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Dear Right-Handed People
Remember jacks? It’s one of those rare games that lasted a couple of generations. My mother played jacks as a girl, and so did I. I still would, if I could find anyone to play with me. And I’d play it...
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The Language of Enslavement
Since reading the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge’s recent New York Times essay on historical markers of African-American women’s history in New England, I’ve been mulling over her use of enslaved. There’s...
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The National Anthem and Me
It’s been years, now, since I stood up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. Mine has not been a protest akin to the controversial kneeling that’s got right-wing pundits’ knickers in a twist....
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Don’t Sanctify Us
To many of us, it seemed John Kelly took a tangent in his recent speech defending the content of Donald Trump’s phone call to a Gold Star widow. After complaining about recent political debate, Kelly...
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Straight Scoop on ‘Strait’
I can’t remember how, on a recent drive to New York, my husband and I got started on a discussion of the phrase strait and narrow. But I do know that, absent a dictionary to straighten things out for...
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Do Courtesy Titles Matter?
I like to think I’m not fussy about honorifics. I don’t tell my undergraduate students how to address me. The current convention seems to be Professor X, though friends who teach at research...
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Mon Dieu! Ma Déesse!
The Académie Française When I spent a year as the George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1979-80, my title was the subject of innumerable ribald comments. Was I the fellowess or the...
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Making a Case and Point
A couple of times a month, it seems, a new blog post or article comes out with advice on grammar for people entering the business or professional world. Since that group includes most of the seniors...
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Wrestling With ‘/s’
I’ve just learned a new bit of shorthand for internet communication: /s. As a fiction writer and nosy person generally, I like to read the comments that follow particularly controversial articles and...
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(W)racked
I love it when the comments to these blog posts prompt another discussion. That’s the case this week, when I’ve been thinking about one commenter’s response to the list I compiled from Work + Money’s...
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The Politics of ‘Bonjour-Hi’
In three weeks, I am heading off to France, where I will be teaching for the spring semester. So I’m getting ready to say “Bonjour” to just about everyone I meet. I speak French fluently, but to brush...
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