Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler's song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term "pound sign" for the symbol #. I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I've heard […]
Charles Krauthammer has joined the chorus of pundits using presidential first-person pronouns to test the theory that a lie told often enough becomes the truth ("The selective modesty of Barack Obama", WaPo, 7/9/2010): It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it […]
Late-breaking news: The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer as the new "On Language" columnist. Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. [alas, a non-restrictive relative clause missing its comma] The column is a fixture in The […]
William Safire's On Language column used to feature regular reports from the Squad Squad, readers who wrote to him with examples of redundant language. His column from 11/5/1989, for example, cites the Isis construction, the phrase ad hoc task force ("as if all task forces were not by their nature ad hoc"), references to the […]
While people are discussing the label polymath in another thread (which reports that the polymathic Noam Chomsky has been cited as, in descending order, a philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, and author, but not as a linguist), a letter to the New York Times Magazine (October 18, p. 12, from Andrew Charig of Middlefield, Mass.) […]
Back in June of 2002, one of William Safire's On Language columns began this way: 'The South Carolina primary between Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in 2000," wrote Eleanor Randolph, the New York Times editorialist, referring to Representative Lindsey Graham's current campaign for the Senate, "left Republicans in his state bitter and divided. That said, […]
In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (already available online here), I take a look back at the legacy of the column's founder, William Safire. As I write there, "Safire's acute awareness of the limits of his own expertise was often lost on fans and critics alike." Indeed, the "language […]
Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon […]
Here's the first sentence of William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve": Taking on the issue of the cost of health care, a Washington Post editorialist intoned recently that “knowing more about which treatments are effective is essential” — knowing about when to use a plural verb is tough, too — “but, without […]
Just a pointer to Jan Freeman's "On Language" column — she was subbing for Bill Safire — in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, about Ambrose Bierce's advice on English usage in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909), which Jan characterizes as "often mysterious, perverse and bizarre". With examples.
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This week's NYT On Language column features Patricia T. O'Conner and Stuart Kellerman defending singular they ("All Purpose Pronoun", 7/26/2009). They lead, topically, with the value of shedding five characters from "he or she" to help stay under the limit of 140 characters per tweet. And they blame the retreat from singular they to sex-neutral […]
Edward Liddy chose, bizarrely, to start the third paragraph of his Op-Ed piece in today's WaPo ("Our Mission at AIG: Repairs, and Repayment") with a classical allusion: Mistakes were made at AIG, and on a scale that few could have imagined possible. The most egregious of those began in 1987, when the company strayed from […]
A couple of days ago, Gail Collins asked ("Just Steele Yourselves", NYT 3/6/2009): So is Steele the de facto leader of the Republican Party? Anybody who announces “I’m the de facto leader” probably isn’t. Then who is? Rush Limbaugh? He sure is enjoying the attention. “The administration is enabling me,” he told Politico. Honestly, “enabling” […]