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 […]
In my work as a copyeditor, one of the most common style errors I see is the overuse of quotation marks. Of course quotation marks should be used to set off quotations, but some writers have a rather expansive notion of what quotation marks should be used for, sprinkling them liberally throughout a document on […]
Last week a story started making the rounds claiming that the Australian accent is the result of an “alcoholic slur” from heavy-drinking early settlers. Here’s the story from the Telegraph, which is where I first saw it. The story has already been debunked by David Crystal and others, but it’s still going strong. The story […]
As my last post revealed, a lot of people are concerned—or at least pretend to be concerned—about the use of anxious to mean “eager” or “excited”. They claim that since it has multiple meanings, it’s ambiguous, and thus the disparaged “eager” sense should be avoided. But as I said in my last post, it’s not […]
To make up for not posting for a few months, I’ve added a few new shirts to the Arrant Pedantry Store. Take a look! If you see a design you like but want it on a different shirt or other product, you can use the product designer here. And through September 1, you can get […]
I recently became aware of a column in the Chicago Daily Herald by the paper’s managing editor, Jim Baumann, who has taken upon himself the name Grammar Moses. In his debut column, he’s quick to point out that he’s not like the real Moses—“My tablets are not carved in stone. Grammar is a fluid thing.” […]
A couple of weeks ago, Nancy Friedman tweeted a link to an article about Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of Green Eggs and Ham. And sadly but predictably, whoever wrote the press release about the announcement felt compelled to write in Seussian verse, despite having no idea how to do so. Here’s the official press release, and […]
In “Why Descriptivists Are Usage Liberals”, I said that there some logical problems with declaring something to be right or wrong based on evidence. A while back I explored this problem in a piece titled “What Makes It Right?” over on Visual Thesaurus. The terms prescriptive and descriptive were borrowed from philosophy, where they are […]
Yesterday a post appeared on QuickandDirtyTips.com (home of Grammar Girl’s popular podcast) that appears to have been written by a company called Knowingly, which is promoting its Correctica grammar-checking tool. They claim that “online grammar errors have increased by 148% in nine years”. If true, it would be a pretty shocking claim, but the numbers […]
Outside of linguistics, the people who care most about language tend to be prescriptivists—editors, writers, English teachers, and so on—while linguists and lexicographers are descriptivists. “Descriptive, not prescriptive!” is practically the linguist rallying cry. But we linguists have done a terrible job of explaining just what that means and why it matters. As I tried […]
