June 16, 2016
15% Off All T-Shirts
Now through June 21, get 15% off all T-shirts in the Arrant Pedantry Store. Just use the code TSHIRT16 at checkout. Come take a look!
June 15, 2016
Sorry, Merriam-Webster, but Hot Dogs Are Not Sandwiches
On the Friday before Memorial Day, Merriam-Webster sent out this tweet: Have a great #MemorialDayWeekend. The hot dog is a sandwich. https://t.co/KeNiTAxPAm — Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) May 27, 2016 They linked to this post describing ten different kinds of sandwiches and asserted that “yes, the hot dog is one of them.” They say, We know: the […]
June 6, 2016
Book Review: Perfect English Grammar
Disclosure: I received a free review PDF of this book from Callisto Media. Grant Barrett, cohost of the public radio program A Way with Words, recently published a book called Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking. In it, Barrett sets out to help writers like himself who may not have […]
May 18, 2016
On a Collision Course with Reality
In a blog post last month, John McIntyre took the editors of the AP Stylebook to task for some of the bad rules they enforce. One of these was the notion that “two objects must be in motion to collide, that a moving object cannot collide with a stationary object.” That is, according to the […]
April 25, 2016
Free Shipping
It’s that time again! Now through May 1, get free shipping on orders of two or more shirts from the Arrant Pedantry Store when you use the coupon code TWOWOO. Oh, and did I mention that I have a new shirt design? Check it out!
April 4, 2016
ACES Presentation: Copyediting and Corpus Linguistics
On Saturday, I presented at the twentieth annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society, held in Portland, Oregon. My topic was “Copyediting and Corpus Linguistics”, and my aim was to give editors a crash course in using corpora to research usage questions. I was floored by the turnout—there were probably close to two hundred […]
March 28, 2016
The Taxing Etymology of Ask
A couple of months back, I learned that task arose as a variant of tax, with the /s/ and /k/ metathesized. This change apparently happened in French before the word was borrowed into English. That is, French had the word taxa, which came from Latin, and then the variant form tasca arose and evolved into […]
February 4, 2016
A Rule Worth Giving Up On
A few weeks ago, the official Twitter account for the forthcoming movie Deadpool tweeted, “A love for which is worth killing.” Name developer Nancy Friedman commented, “There are some slogans up with which I will not put.” Obviously, with a name like Arrant Pedantry, I couldn’t let that slogan pass by without comment. A love […]
January 28, 2016
Historic, Historical
My brother recently asked me how to use pairs of words like historic/historical, mathematic/mathematical, and problematic/problematical. The typical usage advice is pretty straightforward—use historic to refer to important things from history and historical to refer to anything having to do with past events, important or not—but the reality of usage is a lot more complicated. […]
January 6, 2016
The Atlantic Is Wrong about Dog Pants
While on my Christmas vacation, I came across this article in the Atlantic on the question of what proper dog pants should look like: the image on the left, or the image on the right. The image originally came from a Facebook page called Utopian Raspberry—Modern Oasis Machine (UR-MOM), and from there it hit Twitter […]