A site to help make English grammar more understandable without dumbing down either its significance or its usage.
I attended the Los Angeles Dodgers-Boston Red Sox "historic" game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum last night, which you can read more about on my blog Le Food News, and the most memorable part of the evening was the ridiculous prices being charged for mediocre food and drink. Worse, people were actually paying the prices! [...]
In my destitute/semi-retired state, I have a lot of time for channel surfing, and at the 4 p.m. hour, the most engaging TV show is generally The O’Reilly Factor. Today, one of the e-mails O’Reilly read (why isn’t the past tense red?) accused him of being disputatious. Now, there’s a great word, though it generally applies [...]
Joe Francis, Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur (now temporarily out of jail), is gloating that he has both nude and same-gender sex videos* of infamous escort and Eliot Spitzer-slayer Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Meanwhile, the Orange County, Calif., Board of Supervisors is itself going wild by renaming everything public OC this and OC that, such as John Wayne [...]
It’s rare to be watching TV and hear someone correct another for his or her English usage, and it’s even rarer that I would turn on an L.A. Clippers telecast–except in sheer boredom–but that’s exactly what I did this past night. Now, Ralph Lawler is the Clippers’ main play-by-play caller, and he has a sidekick whose [...]
Thanks to The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, whose column appears every other Friday in the Wall Street Journal, I’ve been reminded of those infamous readability scales that judge the grade-level of your writing. Since the Flesch-Kindcaid readability formula has been built into Microsoft Word’s Tools function, one can easily check one’s "readability level" while using [...]
I think we all have a good idea of what the phrase "through thick and thin" means for us today, but almost none of us has any idea of its derivation. I subscribe to a service called "A Phrase A Week" that examines these matters, and this week that phrase came up. However, what I [...]
Listening to the Dan Patrick Show this morning on radio, I heard one of his guests quote the phrase cock strong to mean a person with strength of purpose. The guess deliberately disabused the notion that the cock being referred to was part of the human anatomy. Instead, as Patrick chimed it, it referred to [...]
As I sat in a Miami Beach coffee shop this morning on a silly and basically meaningless trip to Florida for baseball’s annual spring training, I picked up a copy of the Miami Herald and read over bacon and eggs how a mother had spent 38 years at her comatose daughter’s side caring for her with [...]