Archive for Words

A couple of weeks ago, in my post “The Value of Prescriptivism,” I mentioned some strange reasoning that I wanted to talk about later—the idea that there are many usages that are not technically wrong, but you should still avoid them because other people think they’re wrong. I used the example of a Grammar Girl [...]

I just came across the sentence “George A. Smith became the namesake for St. George, Utah” while editing. A previous editor had changed it to “In 1861 St. George, Utah, became the namesake of George A. Smith.” Slightly awkward wording aside, I preferred the unedited form. Apparently, though, this is an issue of divided usage, [...]

Earlier today on Twitter, Mark Allen posted a link to this column on the Columbia Journalism Review’s website about a few points of usage. It begins with a familiar anecdote about dictionary maker Samuel Johnson and proceeds to analyze the grammar and usage of the exchange between him and an unidentified woman. Pretty quickly, though, [...]

Last week’s earthquake in northern Japan reminded me of an interesting pet peeve of a friend of mine: she hates the word temblor. Before she brought it to my attention, it had never really occurred to me to be bothered by it, but now I can’t help but notice it and be annoyed anytime there’s [...]

A few days ago John McIntyre took a whack at the Associated Press Stylebook‘s penchant for flat assertions, this time regarding the spelling of gray/grey. McIntyre noted that gray certainly is more common in American English but that grey is not a misspelling. In the comments I mused that perhaps gray is only more common [...]

The other day at work I came across a strange construction: an author had used “not surprising” as a sentence adverb, as in “Not surprising, the data show that. . . .” I assumed it was simply an error, so I changed it to “not surprisingly” and went on. But then I saw the same [...]

I know this topic has been addressed in detail elsewhere (see goofy’s post here for example), but a friend recently asked me about it, so I thought I’d take a crack at it. It’s fairly straightforward: there are the complex, implicit rules that people have been following for over a thousand years, and then there [...]

Recently I received an e-mail from my bank informing me that they had experienced some system outages. What struck me was that the e-mail kept referring to “impacted systems,” and it conjured up some strange mental images. A lot of people hate the verb impact because they say that it should only be a noun [...]

The other day at work I came across a fantastic formation I’d never seen before: “newest fangled.” It was from a speech given back in 1938 by J. Reuben Clark at Brigham Young University, where the law school is named for him. The speech was pretty formal and serious, so I’m not sure if I [...]

In my mind, less and fewer illustrates quite well virtually all of the problems of prescriptivism: the codification of the opinion of some eighteenth-century writer, the disregard for well over a millennium of usage, the insistence on the utility in a superfluous distinction, and the oversimplification of the original rule leading to hypercorrection. I found [...]