The Oatmeal has, as usual, nailed it: “Two half-wits do not equal a full-witted person. They equal a quarter-witted person.” + more
The Oatmeal has, as usual, nailed it: “Two half-wits do not equal a full-witted person. They equal a quarter-witted person.” + more
The two or three of you who regularly follow this blog will no doubt have noticed that we’ve been somewhat + more
In 1955, Robert B. Young, of Ford Motor Company’s marketing research department, sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Modernist + more
When people have their writing “corrected,” they usually discover that their long, complicated sentences receive the most correction and criticism. + more
Everything about Rachel Toor’s column in Saturday’s Spokesman-Review is absolutely spot-on. Well…almost everything. Toward the end she writes, “As a professor, I’ve + more
simultaneity (noun) The simultaneous representation of several aspects of the same object. Linda had heard of the concept of simultaneity + more
“The initial thought behind Baileys Irish Cream took about 30 seconds,” writes David Gluckman in the Irish Times. “In another 45 + more
“Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to + more
From Frank L. Cioffi’s indispensable One Day in the Life of the English Language: A Microcosmic Usage Handbook (2015), comes this + more
Around here, we do words as well as we can. And sometimes we do them pretty well, though we try + more
So while I was taking a break from being awesome today, I completed the Chicago Style Workout 17: Hyphens, Part + more
Can you spot the typo in the following excerpt from page 243 of Where the Water Goes (2017) by David Owen? + more
Sarah Sweet’s “Barbarians at the Gates of Grammar” reminds me a little bit of Mark Twain’s apocryphal “When I was a boy of + more
A friend alerted me to John McWhorter’s delightful essay “English is not normal” over at Aeon. Here’s how it begins: English + more
The Reverend Sydney Smith to Lady Holland, May 23, 1811: How very odd, dear Lady Holland, to ask me to + more