Guerrilla Movements in Grammar
Outrage changes an apostrophe edict, and a group of Londoners are copy-editing the streets.
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Slowly but surely, the apostrophe has been forgotten or purposely left behind in an increasing array of words. The very public feuding over public places and punctuation is here again — and it's been going on far longer than you might think.
Outrage changes an apostrophe edict, and a group of Londoners are copy-editing the streets.
Grammar. In honor of its beauty and, more importantly, its usefulness to all of us, there is a National Grammar Day, a day that grammarians have been celebrating since 2008. How should a word-minded person celebrate?
The misused word is everywhere, proliferating like fruit flies 'round a bowl of rotting bananas. We must stop it before it goes too far.
Jen Doll rounded up the year's worst words today, setting one of our commenters off on a mini-rant about noun-ified verbs.
Which were the best—most amusing, most mortifying, funniest, most cringeworthy, and most interesting—mistakes of the year? Herewith, our favorites.
Instead of just groaning and reading on, a legion of spelling sticklers are using Twitter to try and sweep the web clean.
Let's take a minute to get Grammar-Real: It has come to my attention of late that many of us are using hyphens wrong. This is not, of course, the hyphen's fault.
We know you're waiting to vote, among other bits and pieces of waiting. But as you're waiting in reportedly long lines, what exactly are you muttering in your mind, or tweeting to your followers, or posting on your Facebook page, or texting to your friends? On or in?
When did The New York Times start talking like Yoda, and when did we begin to notice it? On it, the Twitter account @NYTPrepositions is.
Today in the New York Times' Opinionator blog there's a love letter of sorts from Ben Yagoda, author and professor of English at the University of Delaware, to the dash.
One clear lesson about language is that it's ever-evolving, but at the same time, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Take the case of whom.
Apropos of crutch words, apropos of despicable words, apropos of very word-world as we know it, there's another word rant that I must bring to your immediate attention. Really. Really! Really? Oh yes.
As we gathered punctuation favorites from a range of our favorite writers, novelists, and word knowledgable people, we ran into a cold, hard fact. Some punctuation marks were hated, perhaps none more vehemently than the exclamation point. It was a mark hated most of all by Grantland staff writer Rembert Browne.
Punctuation can be both the great love and the occasional bane of a writer's existence, and it's not strange that a love affair may crop up with regard to one of those marks—or, contrarily, perhaps a great hatred may grow.
Prepare yourself, people who love words and writing and those symbols we use to designate pauses and emotions and inflections (and such) throughout our prose and occasionally poetry as well. Monday is the annual holiday of National Punctuation Day!
The New York Times' After Deadline blog contains a fantastic letter to the paper's editor from March of 1924 that reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same, copy-wise and otherwise.
We feel strongly about the punctuation we interact with in our daily lives. Today, we learn something about the @ that we did not know, leading us to wonder about the personality traits of our other favorite grammatical marks?
Years from now when we think back to the early times of the decade of 2010, we will surely think of a new wave of Internet-life in which complete and total social media immersion really began. And we'll also think of the exclamation point.
It's rare that politics offers so much excitement for the grammatical folks among us, but this season is shaping up quite nicely, what with "Amercia"-gate, and now some great word nerd backlash about Obama's campaign slogan.
Have you used a zombie noun today? Hang your head in shame, because you're part of the problem.
Some of us never forget the first sentence we conjugated. Others of us are, like, LOL, WTF?
It was with mixed feelings that we received the news that the Queen's English Society would disband by the end of June, but we felt sadness not because of the loss of the grammar constabulary but because, in the end, nobody cared.
If there's one thing Amercia loves, it's a good, old-fashioned viral typo.
After we unleashed our wrath about the world's unruly use of exclamation points in emails, we got to thinking: Which other punctuation marks could we do without?
After a day of staring at Twitter, we're sharing our favorite tweets that made no sense
Today in books: Elmore Leonard's new book comes out Tuesday, NPR picks the one poetry collection you need to buy this year, and Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln is going to be a National Geographic documentary.
Contrary to all the LOLs, emoticons and hashtags happening in feeds across the Twittersphere, Twitter isn't destroying the English language.
That's with an -er, not an -or; go tell your copy editors
The news service holds style court on Twitter, which it tells us how to spell
A bogus report of Oxford University Press led to online hilarity
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