Language Log

Here's how not to place a temporal modifier. See if you readily understand this sentence (from the UK's Daily Mirror) on first reading: [H]e callously instructed his lawyers to add to her family's pain by implying the 13-year-old ran away because she was unhappy at home during days of cross examination. So this poor 13-year-old […]

With this post I reach my thousandth Language Log contribution. I wrote 676 posts for the old series, before the original server died in agony in April 2008. Those were written from Santa Cruz, California (between 2003 and 2005 and in 2006-2007), from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard (2005-2006), and from Edinburgh, Scotland (2007-2008) The […]

A (not particularly amusing) cartoon in the July 5 New Yorker has a doctor giving a bedridden patient some food on a tray and saying: "That which doesn't kill you might give you stomach trouble." The only reason I mention it here is that its oddly stilted wording (why not say "What doesn't kill you"?) […]

Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor, maintains a blog for undergraduate economics students. On it, back in 2006, he placed a guide to good economics writing. And I fear that you may already have guessed what, with sinking heart, I correctly foresaw that I would find therein.

The Apple is a site "where teachers meet and learn". It has a page where teachers can supposedly learn from "11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid". And guess what: as Steve Jones has pointed out to Language Log, not a single one of these alleged grammar mistakes is both (a) genuinely relevant to English grammar and […]

Sticking a label on a manila file of household papers this morning I noticed that the instructions on the sheet of labels said "Insert opposite end into typewriter." It wasn't so much the ridiculous controllingness that made me smile (the labels had no header strip, so they were symmetrical, and it would make absolutely no […]

All this discussion of Strunk and White (among other places, here and here) reminds me that in the Spring 2009 issue of The American Scholar, William Zinsser reflected on his book On Writing Well (first published in 1976, now in its 6th edition, with sales approaching 1.5 million copies, a figure dwarfed by S&W but […]

(Mark Liberman and I posted on this topic at nearly the same time. Consider this to be an amplification of Mark's posting.) Yesterday was Strunk & White day — the actual 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements Of Style — which National Public Radio celebrated twice. Morning Edition had "Strunk And White's Venerable […]

If you've ever found yourself thinking that Language Log writers seem concerned with form rather than function — that they obsess about the details of how things are put, to the exclusion of concern with the core content that really matters, and that they will probably miss the historic excitement of this January 20 grubbing […]

While filing some examples of summative constructions, I came across the discussion of summative modifiers in Joseph Williams's Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (I have the 3rd ed., of 2008), which made me wonder whether we had said good things about Williams's books on style here on Language Log. The answer is yes, […]