Talking of “verbing”, as Glossophilia was doing yesterday, we had a lovely example of it coming from the U.S.’s favorite presidential wannabe a couple of days ago, as Dana Milbank reported colorfully in the Washington Post today: Continue reading
Category Archives: Grammar
“Grammar slammers: Dems crush GOP”
Yes, that’s a real headline: it appeared in USA Today last month. Glosso is a little behind the curve here, having missed this important political news when it first broke at the beginning of October — but hey: it’s never too late to help educate the electorate, especially in the all-important matter of grammatical competence. If you’re still on the fence about which party or presidential candidate you’re going to support over the coming 12 months (but do hurry up, because you’ve only got a year left to decide), and grammar happens to be an important voting issue for you, we have some useful inside info, courtesy Grammarly. Here’s the scoop. Continue reading
Transitioning pronouns …
In the comment section of today’s Evening Standard (London).
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Texas textbooks: it’s not just the facts that distort the truth …
Texas textbooks have been in and out of the news — notoriously — since 2010, when the Lone Star State’s board of education adopted its revised curriculum, which has just recently come into effect in Texas classrooms. These texts have been heavily criticized for whitewashing or rewriting aspects of American history — including most notably the facts and truths about slavery and its role in the Civil War. As Bobby Finger reported in Jezebel last month:
“In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum that … would “put a conservative stamp on history” once going into effect in 2015. In advance of their debut in Texas classrooms last week, it was widely reported that the new textbooks, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson, “whitewashed” slavery by downplaying the brutality of the facts and treating it as a “side issue.” … Their contents demonstrate a troubling creep away from teaching actual history—and the unpleasant truth of America’s legacy of racism—and toward a sanitized fable of historical white morality.”
But it’s not just the facts or even the vocabulary in these schoolbooks that are loaded with inaccuracies and bias or cleansed of harsh truths: it’s the very manner in which these narratives are phrased that has some commentators deeply concerned. Continue reading
Due to time and usage, “due to” and “because of” enjoy adverbial synonymy
“Due to inability to market their grain, prairie farmers have been faced for some time with a serious shortage of sums to meet their immediate needs.”
That’s not the Queen’s English!, the purists and prescriptivists are beginning to protest (and I have to admit, my ears are slightly cringing in sympathy). Isn’t “due to”, strictly speaking, an adjectival phrase, meant to describe nouns and not verbs? If you can’t replace it successfully with “caused by” or “attributable to”, shouldn’t you be sent to the grammatical corner to gather your thoughts and rephrase your words? Continue reading
16 movie title bloopers
He did? Get game? Or does that mean he has got game — currently — whatever “game”-without-an-article means? As in, “He’s got that thing called game”? Or did he get that article-less game last week, on the same night that he got milk? Maybe it becomes apparent when you see the movie (which I had the chance to do this evening when it popped up on my TV guide), but I think we can safely say that its title lacks clarity — unless game is an abstract quality that he acquired some time in the recent past…
Here are 15 other movie titles that could have done with a good edit. If you can’t work out where they went wrong, check out their copy-edited versions below. Continue reading
Homing in on home
“I’m coming home
I’m coming home
tell the world I’m coming home”
So the song goes, and it’s a familiar refrain. We all know the definition of that abstract four-letter word, whose actual meaning is unique to everyone who uses it. But here’s a funny question: when we talk about “coming home”, “going home”, “getting home” or “being home,” what role in the sentence does the generic place-name play: is it a noun, as most places tend to be, or, strangely, could it be an adverb? Continue reading
In the news … (May 22)
TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky. Stories about language usage in the news this past month include unexpected Latin translations; an inappropriate exclamation mark; a famous fictional advertising exec showing off his grammatical prowess; a grammatically correct bank robber; football fans ranked by spelling and grammar ability; a punctuation-free doctoral dissertation; and a very expensive web site name.
Don Draper is a grammar nerd … “Be still, our writerly hearts”
“If you’re a grammar nerd, no doubt your heart grew three sizes when you learned that Stannis Baratheon [from Game of Thrones] and Don Draper [from Mad Men] have something more than awkward relationships with their daughters in common. That’s right, these two emotionally unavailable men are also grammar pedants. Be still, our writerly hearts.” So wrote Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson shortly after the airing of Mad Men‘s penultimate episode a few evenings ago, and oh how right she was — about our hearts growing three sizes.
And thanks to Vanity Fair, we can now watch that breathtaking moment over and over and over again, without tiring of the memory of Don’s linguistic prowess. (Except: shouldn’t it be any more — two words — rather than one? Perhaps that’s for a separate discussion …)
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The narrative you
“After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music.”
“Your day breaks, your mind aches / You find that all the words of kindness linger on / When she no longer needs you”