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Word Pardons
Image by Jarrett Heather Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” video now has close to nine million hits, with the thumbs-up outweighing the thumbs-down more than 100 to 1. For those who take debates over...
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Orwell in Gaza
The New York Times’s hesitant foray into the question of language in this latest enactment of hostilities between Israel and Hamas made me long for the ringing tones of George Orwell. It’s hard to miss...
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Folks, It’s Torture
There probably is such a thing a scrutinizing a public speaker’s language too carefully—but not on this blog. Our radar screen lit up this past week as the Twittersphere ricocheted responses to...
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All Done Copyediting/Copy Editing/Copy-Editing
Hallelujah. The copy edits have gone back. Hallelujah. I’m referring here to the 350-page manuscript for my new novel, A Sister to Honor, forthcoming in January 2015, which I received in copy-edited...
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Won’t You Guess My Name?
I didn’t know I was named for the devil until I studied on an exchange program in Belgium. There, I would be introduced as “Mademoiselle Luci Férriss,” and the people who had begun stretching out their...
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Solecizing Roget
I’ve already confessed my love of Roget’s Thesaurus, so I am not simply going to pile on with the current wave of complaints about its popularity among students. This popularity, dubbed Rogeting by the...
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One Less Toilet
I spent Labor Day weekend at a grown-up camp for world-music singers in northern Vermont, a happy retreat to the only thing I ever liked about camp, which was all the group sings after dinner. The rude...
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Speaking Geek
I’ve always envied people born in small countries like Belgium who grow up learning several different languages. And while I remain stumped by languages written in any script other than the Latin...
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The Vortex of Authorial Avoidance
Welcome to the vortex, the tourbillion, where we turn and turn in the widening gyre of authorial avoidance of whatever truly dire error we may have committed in the penning of our novel. Step right...
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Sounding Real by Speaking Fake
Arthur Chu is apparently best known as one of the top Jeopardy! winners of all time, but since I haven’t watched Jeopardy! since the last millennium, I have no opinion on his style of play or use of...
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Grammar: The Movie
It’s got an all-star cast: Steven Pinker of Harvard, John McWhorter of Columbia, Geoffrey Nunberg of Berkeley, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Adele Goldberg of Princeton, Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty, Brad Hoover...
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Mentor, the Verb
Every year, as I fill out my institution’s Professional Activities Inventory, I’m vaguely aware that one of the categories soliciting a response—Mentoring of Colleagues—uses language far more...
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Truly, Madly, Deeply Avoiding Adverbs
Pity the lowly adverb. Like the adenoids (I had mine removed, at age 4) or the appendix, it is regarded by rule-mongers as unnecessary, left over from a time when the body of language needed this...
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Noms de Guerre
Q: What do great poems and wars have in common? A: They don’t need fancy names. Shakespeare didn’t title his sonnets, and I’m fairly sure that no one fighting in the Wars of the Roses thought of them...
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MooT Pursuits
I have a soft spot for people who invent games, especially games with words. And by way of some random keystroke, I found myself on the mailing list of Jon Steeves, inventor of MooT, “the game of...
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What’s Interesting About ‘Disinterested’
History is so annoying. Just when you gird your loins to pen an eloquent article about the fine distinctions of language, threading your way among the thickets of the prescriptivist debate to request...
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Passivity and Other Afflictions
Last week, I suggested that we got ourselves into trouble trying to distinguish between disinterest and uninterest because multiple meanings of the word interest put both prefixes at a disadvantage...
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Noping Out
“I love how that goat just nopes out of that situation.” And I love the ring of a newly hatched bit of slang that hasn’t even received its Urban Dictionary definition yet. Here, at its inception, nopes...
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Super!
One of the many casualties of spell checkers is students’ ability to describe their family rituals. Too frequently, recently, they seem to be having super in the dinning room. And from their emails, I...
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Why I Don’t Use Track Changes on Students’ Papers
They arrive now, in a flood, the end-of term papers. For the most part, they are beyond revision at this point, and the task ahead consists mostly of assessment. Still, I find myself clinging to my...
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