http://www.arrantpedantry.com Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:56:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is a subject I've wanted to write about for quite some time, but the recent movie WALL-E has reminded me of the issue once again, and that is this: some people seem to think that logos are the ultimate guide to the orthography of some names. Now, Bill Walsh has ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2008/07/13/logography/ Recently I got a letter from my phone company informing me that my area code will be switching to 10-digit dialing sometime next year. Several times the letter mentioned that we will have to start dialing "10-digits." It was very consistent---every time the numeral 10 was followed by the noun ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2008/06/02/numbers-and-hyphens/ First off, let me apologize for not writing anything in a while. I've been busy with preparations for grad school and a new baby and haven't gotten around to working on any of the ideas I've got bouncing around. I promise I'll work on something soon. But for now, you'll have ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2008/05/20/new-store-new-products/ Recently I was involved in an online discussion about the pronunciation of the word the before vowels. Someone wanted to know if it was pronounced /ði/ ("thee") before vowels only in singing, or if it was a general rule of speech as well. His dad had said it was a ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2008/03/19/rules-are-rules/ Believe it or not, I wasn't always the grammar free-love hippie that I am now. I actually used to be known as quite a grammar nazi. This was back in my early days as an editor (during my first year or two of college) when I was learning lots of ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2008/02/04/how-i-became-a-descriptivist/ In my current job making day planners, I get to read a lot of quotes. I don't know who decided that day planners needed cheesy motivational and inspirational quotes in the first place, but that's just the way it's done. One of my tasks is to compile databases of quotes ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2008/01/02/source-checking/ 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 ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2007/10/07/one-fewer-usage-error/ I was just reading this article about Adobe's new online word processor, and something caught my eye. In the screenshot, there's a sentence that's highlighted, and a bubble in the margin says, "Passive wording fixed." First of all, it makes me groan to think that so many people still think ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2007/10/01/the-passive-voice-is-corrected-by-buzzword/ From time to time, websites such as MSN and Yahoo challenge their readers to quizzes on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. These quizzes are often written more to stump than to educate, so the questions are worded in confusing ways, and the answers are masked in vagueness to the point where ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2007/08/05/errant-pedantry/ The other day, while researching baseball facts for a project at work, I discovered two eggcorns---my very first---that are apparently undocumented. They're not to be found in the Eggcorn Database. One of them was a very common type of error---"the life in times" instead of "the life and times." The ... http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2007/05/07/eggcorns/