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 […]
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.
When I give lectures on why you should not listen to prescriptivists' dimwitted prattle about the wrongness of constructions that are fully grammatical and always were, people sometimes ask me what I would regard as bad grammar, as if such cases were going to be hard to find. So occasionally I note down striking cases […]
I've simply had it with all the people who keep telling me that they revere The Elements of Style because it's such a nice little book and helped them so much with their writing when they were in college that they carry it everywhere they go and give it to all their students or hand […]
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 […]
Thanks to reader DS, following up on this morning's post on the Philadelphia Newspapers' bankruptcy case ("The indubitable equivalent of such claims"), I now know which commas were at stake, and why. The critical commas were these, in 1129(b)(2)(A)(ii) of Chapter 11, subchapter II, of U.S. Code Title 11: (ii) for the sale, subject to […]
James Taranto starts out his latest Best of the Web column with some clever wordplay, based on the status of English as a semi-negative-concord language ("He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing", 12/1/2009): Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"–to […]
Reader David Landfair writes to ask about someone vs. somebody (and, by extension, other indefinite pronouns in -one vs. -body): A friend was looking over something I'd drafted this morning and corrected "there's somebody here" to "there's someone here," citing a "rule" that someone is subjective case like he/she/who, while somebody is its objective case correlate. He […]
For the last dozen years, it's been known that young people who follow the stylistic advice of Strunk & White are more likely to get Alzheimer's disease when they get old. Well, at least, in a cohort of nuns, Low idea density and low grammatical complexity in autobiographies written in early life were associated with […]
A nice example of the way singular they works was overlooked (like health care, the economy, and everything else in the past week of "racial politics") during the brouhaha over President Obama's press conference remarks about the arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Professor Henry Louis Gates. Obama said: . . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting […]
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Back on June 6, in his post "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18", Geoff Pullum wrote: I am not a style doctor or writing adviser, and (unlike Strunk and White) I don't think everyone should write like me. My interest here is solely in the fact that we need an explanation for the […]