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Goodbye to All That E-Mail
Remember the good old days, when we complained about students e-mailing us all the time? Like back in 2006, when The New York Times ran an article on students’ pestering of their professors with...
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Raising the Roof
Well, we have a government again. But since the debates over money and politics are due to rev up before their jets have even cooled, let’s take a moment to look at one very messy metaphor. I’m...
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Killing What Darlings?
The title of the new Daniel Radcliffe vehicle, Kill Your Darlings, cleverly cross-references a familiar piece of writerly advice and the suggestion of murder. It also, according to my...
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Meeting Jibboos
It’s around this time in the semester that I feel the particular burden of being a teacher of creative writing in an English department within a liberal-arts college. Not that we are any more burdened,...
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A Whole Nother Juncture
For some reason, my ears were tuned to a whole nother frequency last week. That is, I heard the word nother everywhere I turned. Mostly it followed the word whole, though I’d swear someone said,...
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Dear #Writer
The New York Times’s “Draft” column began about 18 months ago with an essay by the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri on the power of sentences. It’s been going strong since. Its contributions run the gamut, from...
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Say, ‘What’?
Punctuating dialogue, for reasons I fail to understand completely, is one of the hardest things for my fiction-writing students to master. Autocorrect inserts a capital after any form of so-called...
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Cold Comfort for Graphophobes
I’m writing under deadline, having promised this post to my editor this morning, and I will get it to her this morning, if you count “morning” as lasting until 1:00 p.m., which is when civilized people...
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Siri’s Sex Change
I don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years...
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I’m Not Betting on It
I’m on a phrase hunt, and coming up more or less empty. Some time back, my colleague Ben Yagoda ran through the various ways in which people acknowledge thanks, and grumblings arose at several of...
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Lotsa Books ≠ Lotsa Muses
“Why Wasn’t It ‘Grapes of Glee’?” asked The New York Times last week, practically demanding my attention. The article was on a study using big-data techniques to document the correlation between the...
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Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Words
A colleague sent me a contest offering from the venerable American Scholar, magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Titled “Lingua Americana,” it begins by setting out examples of “wonderfully...
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Cannibal Commas
The writer Bich Minh Nguyen posted a question on Facebook the other day that drew a swell of discussion: Grammar dilemma over here. According to grammar sites we’re supposed to write “Hi, Jane” rather...
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Arrivederci! A Dopo!
I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The...
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Sono Tornata!
Casa Dante in Perano: good wine, bad Wi-Fi Having left my post at Lingua Franca four months ago to work on a book and (very incidentally) dabble in Italian, I thought I’d launch my return (Sono tornata...
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An Epidemic of George
The fur has been flying the last couple of weeks over a recent piece by the conservative pundit George Will. Given that Will’s subject is “the supposed campus epidemic of rape,” it may be impossible...
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A Victory Over Genericide
The New York Times has begun a strange new series titled “Verbatim,” mini-docudramas culled from transcripts of court documents. In its inaugural video, the punch line kicks in when the office worker...
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Beware Hurricane Snooki
I must love language more than I love truth. Example: The venerable Economist, along with several other publications, recently reported on a study whose tentative conclusion was that female-named...
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The Goldfinch and the Stewardess
The literary world has been engaged in a hearty dialogue over the merits and deficiencies of Donna Tartt’s massive novel The Goldfinch, which spent more than 30 weeks on The New York Times best-seller...
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The Pursuit of Happiness—?
Debates about punctuation, for me, are like debates about rests and accidentals in musical scores. They go on and on; if the manuscript is old enough, they can be decided by a coin flip; and they force...
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