Allison Flood, "Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove", The Guardian 5/3/2013: It was a blistering attack on Michael Gove for eroding educational standards and "dumbing down" teaching. But now the 100 academics who wrote an open letter in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum have had their own accuracy […]
…has been featured in the last three Big Nate strips, starting with this one:
The words and phrases that annoy people are typically criticized as over-used, illogical, fashionable among a disliked group, or shifted in a confusing way from an earlier meaning. It's often true that such irksome usages have indeed increased in frequency — thus "at the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's choice […]
If you don't hang out with millennial hipsters, you might not have noticed that the cool kids are listening to music on turntables playing old-fashioned vinyl records, with many of these records being newly released rather than rescued from thrift shops. And you might also have missed a fascinating case of peeve emergence: the "rule" that one […]
A partial inventory of postings on language rage, language peeving, word aversion, and word attraction on Language Log and AZBlog, here. I ran out of steam early this year, so the inventory is reasonably complete only to that point.
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In a comment on yesterday's post on "Momentarily", Alan asked Is there any difference between the language peeves of left-wing authoritarian moralists and right-wing authoritarian moralists? Do they tend to peeve about different kinds of usage? I don't have a large enough sample to make confident generalizations, but my impression is that peevers across the […]
The Académie française has recently added to its website a feature Dire, Ne pas dire ("Say, Don't Say") … qui donne le sentiment de l’Académie française sur les fautes, les tics de langage et les ridicules qui s’observent le plus fréquemment dans le français contemporain. … which gives the feelings of the Académie française on the errors, […]
Matthew Engel ("Why do some Americanisms irritate people?", BBC News 7/13/2011) starts out by describing the phenomenon of American lexical influence on British English. His description is even partly accurate: I have had a lengthy career in journalism. I hope that's because editors have found me reliable. I have worked with many talented colleagues. Sometimes […]
I just had a terrible idea that could probably make someone a modest fortune. I was inspired by Erin Gloria Ryan, "My Love Affair With 'Like'", Jezebel 6/26/2011: I use the word "like" with embarrassing frequency. I've started paying attention to how other people talk as well, and it's amazing how many women who I […]
In the comments on various recent LL posts, someone using various names has been complaining repeatedly and at length about "Linguistic Post-Modernists" who allegedly believe that "there is no such thing as a 'wrong' usage, only nonstandard ones", and so on. Since the associated set of confusions is all too common, I've collected below a […]
The image on the right reproduces a brief passage from a letter that Robert Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor C. Bedford, on October 1, 1795. (Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.) Read it, and see if you can figure out what aspect of it Richard Grant White in 1869 called the […]
Here's a mystery for you. Last summer, the weekly radio show Studio 360 recorded an episode at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The show, which originally aired on 7/17/2009 and ran again yesterday, included a segment about the list of things that members of They Might be Giants "are not allowed to say within the band".
There's a weblog associated with Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True. A couple of days ago, Jerry (or whoever writes on the blog under the name "whyevolutionistrue") posted a couple of familiar eggcorns, described as "two solecisms [that] have recently appeared on this site", and invited readers to "Feel free to contribute those mistakes […]