In a book review on Salon.com, Laura Miller dips a toe in the prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistic debate, one in which some of us (no names) stomp around furiously when people use the phrase “where are you at?” and others (no names, but doubtless their mailboxes have unnecessary apostrophes scratched out) notice that everyone understands [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘grammar’
24 July 2009
Score!
My kid just yelled at the TV, despite his 104 degree fever, because the song informed him that “You and me; solve a mystery…”
He bellowed, “No! ‘You and I’!”
That’s my boy! You tell ‘em, Peanut. In fact, let’s grab some Magic Markers and go to town on your books. There’s a lot of passive voice [...]
13 December 2008
It’s too easy to screw up contemporary English, so now you’re butchering Shakespearean English, too?
Sign painted on outdoor shopping mall of upscale shops: Feel not shame for thou (sic) love of shoes.
Thou love? No, you dunderheaded idiots. (I know, I know. I taught critical thinking. If you insult the party to whom you’re talking, you generally have no point. But this is a collection of stores who would sell [...]
8 December 2008
Please, hire an editor or proofreader.
I cannot, can’t, will not, won’t go to a coffee chain whose napkins proclaim that their efforts will leave the world with “less napkins.” What, in the name of all that is holy, did David Foster Wallace not explain to us in his review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage but that [...]
