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Don’t Thank Me?
Satire can be so subtle. That’s what I thought at first when I read Nick Bilton’s column on digital etiquette in The New York Times. When Mr. Bilton wrote, “Some people are so rude. Really, who sends...
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Dueling Titles
Hundreds of readers opened their New York Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April . . . no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the...
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The Battle[']s Joined
Living, as I do, near Bishops Corner, not far from Corbins Corner, in easy reach of a Walgreens and a Marshalls, not to mention Lyons Gulf service station, I wasn[’]t completely surprised to learn that...
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1ce Upon a Txt
As usually happens when anyone in the academy takes seriously the kinds of communication that happen outside the academy, John McWhorter’s recent TED talk on texting as a new language has prompted a...
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Silence in the Mind’s Ear
“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is...
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Who Says Tomato?
I’ve just wasted a perfectly good morning scrolling through my own pronunciative history. Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has produced a series of...
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Hilary Us Autocorsets
It’s not often I have to hold my legs together to contain myself laughing at some language goof or other. Usually it’s just a know-it-all smile or a forced chuckle. But “The 30 Most Hilarious...
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Coinages of the Realm
(Image by Flicker user Payton Chung) I’m calling it neolohunger: the yearning—to which Calvin Trillin recently confessed in The New York Times and from which I also suffer—to, in Trillin’s words, “slip...
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How to Heart
It began as a logo, designed by Milton Glaser, for an advertising campaign for the City of New York. The heart shape is a rebus, a picture used to replace a word, like the early-reading books that...
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Mind Your Commas, Justin Bieber! Kisses.
Many years ago, a guy I’d known when I was in school in Brussels came to the States, and I was astonished to discover that he was fluent in English. During my time in Belgium, we had spoken only in...
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Grading Congressmen, Grading Students
Every now and then, in academic departments where I’ve worked, faculty members have exchanged graded papers and met to compare and contrast approaches to marking and grading student prose. There’s...
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The Internet, That Old Scapegoat
A new Pew study is out, reporting the effects of the digital revolution on student writing. It’s a broad study with dozens of both thought-provoking conclusions and what strike me as flawed...
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Money and Dames
A good piano tuner can tell when a note resonates perfectly. Such was the feeling in some circles when The New York Sun came up with female dollar as a description of the imagined state of things if...
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What’s Greek About It?
As many of us return to campus this fall, we’ll be passing by various buildings adorned with Greek letters that fewer can identify every year. I’m talking about the fraternity and sorority houses, of...
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You Never Even Call Me by My Name
I never thought I’d be tempted by those gender-neutral pronouns, hir and ze and so on. But the case of Chelsea Manning does give one pause. On August 22, The New York Times announced that Private...
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We’re on the Eve of Disruption
I’m feeling very late to the party. A colleague sent a recent article by Judith Shulevitz in The New Republic, which apparently echoed a post by Andy Rachleff on the Web site TechCrunch, both on the...
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On Quantity
Once every semester my students perform what I call the Molly Bloom exercise in class. We read aloud the first page of Molly’s soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses and I proffer my completely invented notion...
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The Genette Game
I’m teaching a new course this term on what’s commonly known as intertextuality—the web of relations among texts (books, poems, stories, essays, what have you) and the ways in which they comment on,...
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If This, Then That
Many months ago, I celebrated what I still call the subjunctive mood. Now I’m going to rant. We needn’t call it the subjunctive. Let’s call it contrary-to-fact expressions, or contrafactuals. We all...
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The Jargon Prize
The rumor that unsubscribing yourself from an unwanted e-mail list tends to regenerate your address in other unwanted e-mail blasts bears fruit, in my case, with electronic scatter-bombs from sites...
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