Clik here to view.
Scribbling Women
Maybe John McWhorter is just being provocative in his post “Why Kim Kardashian Can’t Write Good.” Following up on his argument that texting and tweeting amount to “talking with your fingers,” he...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Happy Talk
I’ve just returned from France, and the glow has not worn off. What glow, you ask? Would that be the long dinners over excellent wine, finished off with a plate of delectable stinky cheeses? The gilded...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Phoning Home
The summer I was 20, I hatched the insane plan of riding the moped I’d purchased at my job in France through England and Scotland and over to my mother’s ancestral home in Ireland. Various...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Koo-Koo-Ka-Chu, Mx. Robinson
Just when you thought it was safe to go out and play in the fields of gender, along comes Mx. The online version of the Oxford English Dictionary is considering adding this new honorific for those who...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Derp and ‘tude
Mr. Derp Paul Krugman’s attempts at being hip end up landing, I suppose, like hipness attempted by any of us blogging here: midway between cute and cringeworthy. A few weeks ago, his column noted an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Secondhand Emotion
Not being a big user of emoticons or emoji, I usually have to pause to arrive at the difference between them. So I hadn’t given any thought to their function in the sentence until I came across...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Love, Blog Me Do. (You Know I Blog You.)
My husband teases me for skipping past much of the bulk of newspaper editorials to get to the comments. He’s a social scientist, interested in government policies and the social order; I’m a fiction...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Kind of Fiction Do You Write?
This is the question I get most often when people learn I have a new novel out. I understand the context of the question. If you walk into a Barnes & Noble, or go browsing on Amazon, you will see...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Diagramming Trump
According to “steveknows,” commenting on the Slate article “Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!” I have been punked. I don’t care. Gertrude Stein said there was nothing more exciting than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Be a Lover
Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What, then, is the opposite of hate? The answer, it seems to me, changes when we accuse the person rather than the hate or the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From A to Z
Folk etymologies are not unique to the age of Snopes. I discovered this amusing truth just after I’d signed my fellow writer Doug Preston’s letter to the Justice Department encouraging that arm of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Parenting, 1 and 2
I hadn’t given Parent 1 and Parent 2 a thought before I saw the headline on Tennessee’s “reversal” of its “ban on ‘mother’ and ‘father.’” Huh, I thought. How had I missed news of a state’s banning...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s a Passive?
I am not prepared to engage in the Passive Wars. As with any dispute, however, it behooves us to know what the heck it is we’re fighting about. As my colleague Geoffrey Pullum and others have observed,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Love Game
Once a year, Flushing Meadows in New York turns into a 22-ring circus of tennis, and people start asking me, as a lifelong tennis player, what all those words mean. I wasn’t going to write about tennis...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Tennessee Waltz
What is going on in Tennessee? First we learn that they tried to ban mothers and fathers before coming to their senses. Now we learn that their flagship university tried to ban he and she—before it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Frosh
This year, for the first time, I am teaching a freshman — oops, first-year — seminar. Right there is the problem. As readers of this blog know, I like to be on top of the latest gender-neutral...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Lesson in ‘Lessen’
A few months ago we at Lingua Franca received an email from a suffering reader. His eyes are hurting and his ears are subject to a terrible sound. That sound is the verb lessen. Whatever happened to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Amid the Amidsts
First-year undergraduate writing leaves so much to be desired that it seems silly to get stuck on two letters. But as I grade my first set of papers, I’m struck by the sudden ubiquity of –st: It is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Responding to Deafness
A colleague came to me yesterday with a question about a student paper on hearing loss. Should the student, he wanted to know, have capitalized the word deaf? Simply by writing the word as lowercase,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Morphing the Skeuo
Is there any frisson more delicious than the learning of a great new word? OK, don’t answer that. But a great new word is a gift, and I received one last week only to find that it had been passed...
View Article