Tom Porter, "New York Times cross word: NRA spokeswoman denies bizarre threat to 'fist' the publication", Newsweek 8/5/2017: A National Rifle Association spokeswoman in a bizarre dispute denied that she threatened to "fist" the New York Times in a video atacking [sic] the publication. In a video released Thursday entitled “Dana Loesch: We’re Coming For You New York […]
As unneeded further testimony to the lasting damage done by George Orwell's dishonest and stupid essay "Politics and the English language", with its pointless and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all familiar phrases and word usages, Robert Fisk treated his readers in The Independent on August 9 to some ranting about his most […]
Not sure what they mean by "grammar" here, but they sure do have a message:
Last week I read this article about the Mosuo people of southwest China: "The Ethnic Group in China That Doesn’t Have a Word for Father" (10/13/14). The Mosuo are indeed famous for having a matrilineal society, and I had long been aware of their unusual marriage customs, but I was innately suspicious of this sensationalist […]
Anne Curzan, "What to do about 'impactful'?", Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/19/2013: If I were asked to rate new words on a scale from 1-10 based on their aesthetic appeal (note: words’ aesthetic appeal in my opinion—this scale cannot possibly be objective), with 10 being the most appealing and 1 being the least, I would […]
RK sent in a link to a recent NYT sports story containing the sentence "Three batters later, the bases were loaded for Derek Jeter, but he flew out harmlessly to right field", and commented: I watched the game on tv and I can tell you that Derek's feet stayed firmly rooted on the ground. I […]
Tom Maguire, on a blog called JustOneMinute, attempts to fisk the arrest affidavit for George Zimmerman (the man in Sanford, Florida, who shot the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin). Mention is made of "a lack of self-confidence from the prosecution, which switches to the passive voice at a crucial moment in the action." Uh-oh! Passive […]
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"The BBC is a remarkable place", says Nigel Paine, the Head of People Development at the BBC, in his prefatory note to The BBC News Styleguide (2003); "Much of the accumulated knowledge and expertise locked in people’s heads stays that way: occasionally we share, and the result is a bit of a revelation." Paine is […]
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In a modest way, I collect N-to-V conversions in English morphology, via zero derivation, -ize/-ise, -ify, and -ic-ate (brief discussion here). (My colleague Beth Levin has a much larger and better organized collection.) Some of these are long-established, and not particularly transparent semantically, but all of the patterns can be used to innovate verbs — […]
To follow up on Mark's post, below, on the bottomless fatuity of Robert Fisk: we gave a bunch of these items in –ess to the members of the American Heritage Usage Panel some years ago; Kristen Hanson and I reported some of the results in an LSA paper in 1988. What we found is that […]
Robert Fisk, the well-known linguistic paleoconservative, has been reduced to playing little games with his copy editors in order to create material for his columns ("Our language has a way of turning women into men", The Independent, 8/14/2010): A week ago, in my front-page story on the Hiroshima commemoration, I planted a little trap for […]
Here's something for our "Words for X" file, along with some historical fiction and a bit of relevant psychology.
A few days ago at the Guardian, David Marsh brought out the stuffed body of George Orwell and propped it up in the pulpit ("Election 2010 – vote for the cliche you hate the most", 4/9/2010): George Orwell, in his brilliant 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: "When one watches some tired [political] […]