Year: 2017

November 28, 2017

Two Space or Not Two Space

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that you could take the second space after a period away from him when you pry it from his cold, dead fingers. I responded with this image of Ben Wyatt from Parks and Recreation. But I said I’d refrain from sharing my thoughts unless he really wanted […]

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Punctuation 15 Replies to “Two Space or Not Two Space”
November 20, 2017

Book Review: Word by Word

Disclosure: I received a free advance review copy of this book from the publisher, Pantheon Books. I also consider Kory Stamper a friend. A lot of work goes into making a book, from the initial writing and development to editing, copyediting, design and layout, proofreading, and printing. Orders of magnitude more work go into making […]

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Book Reviews 0 Replies to “Book Review: Word by Word
August 23, 2017

Politeness and Pragmatics

On a forum I frequent, a few posters started talking about indirectness and how it can be annoying when a superior—whether a boss or a parent—asks you to do something in an indirect way. My response was popular enough that I thought I might repost it here. What follows is one of the original posts […]

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Pragmatics One Reply to “Politeness and Pragmatics”
June 1, 2017

Cognates, False and Otherwise

A few months ago, I was editing some online German courses, and I came across one of my biggest peeves in discussions of language: false cognates that aren’t. If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you’ve probably learned about false cognates at some point. According to most language teachers and even many language textbooks, false […]

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Historical linguistics, Rants 4 Replies to “Cognates, False and Otherwise”
May 19, 2017

For Whomever the Bell Tolls

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Yagoda wrote a post on Lingua Franca in which he confessed to being a whomever scold. He took a few newspapers to task for messing up and using whomever where whoever was actually called for, and then he was taken to task himself by Jan Freeman. He said that […]

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Grammar, Usage 5 Replies to “For Whomever the Bell Tolls”
January 30, 2017

Changes at the Arrant Pedantry Store, Plus 20% Off

If you’ve been to the Arrant Pedantry Store recently (and if you haven’t, then why not?), then you may have noticed a change that looks small but is actually pretty big: the ability to edit products. Now, instead of only being able to select from the products I’ve already created, you can make your own. […]

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Uncategorized 0 Replies to “Changes at the Arrant Pedantry Store, Plus 20% Off”
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