Back-to-School Review: confusing contractions
Let’s kick off the review session by addressing a confusion that will get you relentlessly and uninterestingly mocked: homophonic pairs. These are pairs like your and you’re or affect and effect, which...
View ArticleBack-to-school review: who and whom
All right, it’s time for the second grammar review section; last week’s looked at contractions and their homophones, and today I’ll look at who and whom. The simplest advice I can give about using whom...
View ArticleGetting lectured by people who don’t know English
You know I hate it when people mock English-as-a-second-language speakers for their grammatical missteps. If your sense of humor is so unrefined as to find ESL speakers’ errors jestworthy, I think...
View ArticleMisuses of “myself” and “yourself”… from 1840.
I’ve mentioned my fondness for compiling historical grammatical errors as a reminder that we are not, point of fact, destroying what used to be a perfect language. Previously, I’d found unnecessary...
View ArticleAn error is an error — except mine
Let me talk about something that I feel like I’ve been circling around for some time, but never quite directly addressed. It’s a common thing in grammar grousers: playing up other people’s questionable...
View ArticleIs there something to lose from an unnecessary rule?
This blog was linked to a while ago in a Reddit discussion of uninterested and disinterested. (My opinion on them is that uninterested is restricted to the “unconcerned” meaning, while disinterested...
View ArticleLazy grammar complaints
I’ve re-read an old column by Tom Chivers, the Telegraph’s assistant comment editor (a job title I would not have thought existed), discussing a complaint that Noam Chomsky committed a linguistic error...
View Article“Can I?”&“May I?”: the historical perspective
If someone were to lend me a time machine and ask me to go back and figure out exactly what first set me down my road to dedicated descriptivism, I would first ask them if perhaps there wasn’t a better...
View ArticleOf course you don’t see patterns in what you don’t understand
I’ve been looking through some unfinished drafts of posts from last year, trying to toss some of them together into something meaningful, and I found one that was talking about the stupid Gizmodo...
View ArticleNational Grammar Day 2013: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked
It’s National Grammar Day 2013, which has really snuck up on me. If you’ve been here in previous years, you know that I like to do three things on March 4th: have a rambling speculative discussion...
View ArticleThe subjunctive might be dying, if you ignore where it’s going strong
If you believe the grammar doomsayers, the English subjunctive is dying out. But if this is the end of the grammatical world, I feel fine — and I say that even though I often mark the subjunctive...
View ArticleGender-neutral “he” and Wendy Davis’s filibuster
If you haven’t already heard, Texas’s state senate was engaged in a political thriller last night. I was able to catch the last 40 or so minutes of its livestream, riding that delightful roller-coaster...
View ArticleRejecting a form that’s too true? A new complaint against “one of the only”.
People pop in fairly regularly to complain about “one of the only”, which I’m just really not that interested in. Usually the complaints are in response to my argument a few years ago that it was...
View ArticleSo “twerk” is in a dictionary. What’s that mean?
I have it on bad authority that English has died. You may have heard the linguistic Chicken Littles milling about Internet, each trying to come up with a more hyperbolic statement about the death of...
View ArticleWhat good is good grammar without good logic?
I’d presumed it’s trivial to show that good grammar can improve your chances of success — not that good grammar is an indication of ability, but merely that having good grammar skills lends an...
View ArticlePoisonous or venomous?
“Poisonous—often confused with venomous—means a plant, animal, or substance capable of causing death or illness if taken into the body. Venomous means capable of injecting venom. A rattlesnake is not...
View ArticleWhile I’m on blogging hiatus, here’s some research
You might have noticed that I’m on a bit of hiatus this month. I’m working on my dissertation and preparing applications for post-grad-school jobs, but luckily something I’d done a little while ago has...
View ArticleThe seductive fear that you’re using words wrong
It’s a dark night; you’re in an unfamiliar city, slightly lost, but pretty sure you’ll know where you are if you just get to the next corner. The streets are quiet. A stranger steps out of the gloom in...
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