June 2012
34 posts
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Mindless Arcade Friday: The Grading Game →
lutter-pour-votre-vie:
My shaken milk brings forth all th’fine young knights to Camelot. And they sayeth, “Tis’ better than thine!” By the gods, tis’ better than thine; I may teacheth you but I’d have to chargeth.
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“Spiegel Online: Which beneficial words do you remember?
Günter Grass: […] I...”
– From an interview in Spiegel Online. (via carolynyates)
I think you mean “aural sex”.
But while I’m on the topic: with VOWELS? Good Lord, that’s intense. How do you even do that? They’re so pointy and oddly shaped, it seems like you could hurt yourself doing such a...
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I came, I saw, I conquered.
Today’s episode of Little Miss Know-It-All: Parallel Construction.
I’d like to see a show of hands on this: Who would like to make his writing clearer, easier and shorter? Great!
Now, another show of hands: Who would like it if the things he read were sharper, smarter and didn’t ramble on and on about something really boring that completely broke the rhythm that the author was clearly trying to...
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What does this guy have to do with the comma? He...
The comma’s ancestors have been used since Ancient Greece, but the modern comma descended directly from Italian printer Aldus Manutius. (He’s also responsible for italics and the semicolon!) In the late 1400s when Manutius was working, a slash mark (/, also called a virgule) denoted a pause in speech. (Virgule is still the word for comma in French.) Manutius made the slash lower in relation to the...
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theoneviki:
“Today, I was reading erotic literature and noticed several errors in syntax, resulting in my “mood” being killed. I was cockblocked by my need for gramatical correctness. FML”
Man, I understand the feeling. I just wish you could spell “grammatical”. And I’m eying those scare quotes and the lack of closing punctuation, but I’m willing to give those things a...
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Exciting Old Obsessions: More Things that Make You... →
jondrowe:
In the spirit of Monday’s thoughts on Convocation, here are some more deplorable back-formations.
Back-formation is not always such a bad thing. It means taking a previously-existing word, and lopping off a prefix or suffix to make a related word. So, for instance, we had the word babysitter before we had a word for what the babysitter actually did, namely, to babysit. A lot of verbs...
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