AP Wants Hyphens to (Literally) Go the Way of the Oxford Comma
The Oxford or serial comma is one of the more divisive parts of the English language (even more so than the singular they), and it looks...Continue reading
Category: Language
First Brexit, Now This: Jacob Rees-Mogg Wants Staff to Use Two Spaces After a Period
As you may know, there's a fairly common practice that when an official is elected or appointed to a new position, said official sends out a...Continue reading
What If English Were Phonetically Consistent? (video)
English is a language that doesn't just borrow words, it follows other languages down dark alleys, clubs them over the head, and rifles through their pockets...Continue reading
When Dictionaries Ruled the World
It's 2018 and we live in an era where the Oxford English Dictionary adds words to its lexicon willy-nilly. If a word is used somewhere in...Continue reading
Infographic: How to Correctly List Adjectives in English
Here's a tip about the English language that native speakers learn instinctively and ESL learners have to learn the hard way. Did you know there's a...Continue reading
Infographic: Weird Plurals
The English language grows by pursuing other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. It is ridiculously complex and contradictory, and...Continue reading
The Ten Lost Letters of the English Alphabet (video)
Here's a fun and useful video for anyone trying to read historical documents or trying to write historical fiction. As everyone who has heard the song...Continue reading
How to Say a Lot and Mean Nothing (videos)
Lorem Ipsum is the name for a class of text generators that can create vast quantities of almost intelligible content. There is apparently an audio equivalent....Continue reading
With the Help of Ivanka Trump, Dictionary.com Chooses “Complicit” as its Word of the Year
In a nod to current events, Dictionary.com has chosen the word "complicit" as its word of the year: Defined as “choosing to be involved in an...Continue reading
About That “Dramatic Growth of Swearing in Books”
A recently published academic paper has shown that the weakening of censorship inside publishers has lead to a dramatic increase in the use of swear words...Continue reading
Did Sherlock Holmes Give us the Cliche ‘the Smoking Gun’?
Arthur Conan Doyle is credited by many for sparking the invention of forensic science through his character, Sherlock Holmes. Now the famed author has been falsely...Continue reading
On Standard eBooks’ “Light Modernization”
When Standard eBooks first gained widespread attention last week, a number of people complained about that project's stated intention to alter the ebooks it created by...Continue reading
43 Words Invented by Authors (video)
Words! As if we weren't already cursed with an excess, writers have a tendency to invent new words dixon-boxen (see?). If you are an entymology nut...Continue reading
Guest Post: In Defense of Grammar Pedantry
This week, the financial press reported the downfall of a high-profile grammar pedant, Professor Paul Romer, the World Bank’s chief economist, who was hoist(ed) on his...Continue reading
“Non-Racist” Grammar & Langauge
Last week the University of Washington, Tacoma, caught some flack from the media for its supposed plan to "dismantle the rules of grammar" because "the conventional rules...Continue reading