Language Log

Yesterday in the New York Times, Dwight Garner took on two revisions of classic books of advice (by Dale Carnegie and Emily Post) — updated for the digital age. "Classic Advice: Please, Leave Well Enough Alone" starts by placing the Carnegie book in its cultural context: Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” […]

A few days ago, Ben Goldacre, or someone pretending to be him on twitter, tweeted dear everyone, when i read your passive sentence constructions i sort of have to convert them into active ones in my head because i'm thick. As Geoff Pullum recently observed I despair when I see this kind of drivel. What […]

I got a message from a former teacher who said her friend had sent her my article about Strunk and White and it had stimulated her to ask me the following question: For 31 years, this is the rule I taught to all of my elementary school students: do not put a comma before "because." […]

Are we losing it? [*] It's been almost three weeks since the latest and greatest episode in the News Corporation phone-hacking scandal began dominating the world's news, and no one at Language Log has yet found a linguistic angle. I mean, Geoff Pullum connected a World Series victory with Strunk & White; I found a […]

The most recent xkcd offers some sound editorial guidance:

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 […]

Yesterday's SAT "question of the day":

In a comment on my post about the president's subordinators, "Jimbino" identified himself as an editor of medical articles, and asserted that Of course, the most common error committed by physicians and nurses (and the NYT) is the use of "at risk for [cancer]" when they mean "at risk of [cancer]." Challenged on this point […]

"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 […]

Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; […]

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 […]

Spot the horrible effect introduced here by an over-picky Wall Street Journal subeditor: Quite often, these games don't even turn out to be good: Fewer than half of them have been decided by 10 points or fewer. That "10 points or fewer" phrase on the end is a desperate and quite ridiculous effort at obeying […]

David Craig asked whether Anand Giridharadas is suffering from the Recency Illusion in his small piece on "so" (Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, NYT 5/21/2010), which observes that “So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped […]