A site to help make English grammar more understandable without dumbing down either its significance or its usage.
In trying to sound and look different than George Bush and his administration, Barack Obama and his admininstration are going through several verbal gyrations designed to make their policies appear different than Dubya’s, while of course maintaining the policies intact. This is called appeasing the far left (and the middle and regular left). Case in point: The [...]
This guy’s pretty good, but don’t cheat and look at the answers until you’ve completed all ten questions: Are You a Grammar Geek?
Then, I guess we’d all write like Jessica Lee, who’s a recruiter and has a blog of her own called Jessica Lee Writes (but she forgot to add "Without Using Capitals"). I guess writing in all lower case is considered cutesy or moderne or something, but to me, it’s just sloppy and bad and inconsiderate [...]
I just received an e-mail report that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not without advance warning, has ceased its print edition and gone completely to an online format. The report claims that the P-I thus becomes "the first major American newspaper" to go all digital, but the author forgot that the Christian Science Monitor, certainly not a [...]
I worked for almost 15 years for a Japanese company, and we learned that the Chinese characters for crisis–weiji–meant "danger and opportunity." It’s since become urban legend to look for opportunity in every danger. Now, all this has been debunked by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of [...]
I came across a posting called "European Commission Adopts English," in which the author proclaims that certain confusing English sounds were being clarified, for instance, the hard "c" being replaced with a "k" and so on. It sounds scarily real, but hopefully it’s all spoof.
While the mainstream press refuses to find a single fault with our new president, even proclaiming his speeches to be masterpieces (whereas all I hear is a lot of lawyer doublespeak and fast talk), it turns out that he’s a teleprompter type of guy, with a tendency to blow it when he’s not behind one of [...]
As much as I enjoy watching CNBC cable, especially Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow (to say nothing of Melissa Lee!), whenever I go to the CNBC Web site, I’m appalled by the twisted grammar and misspellings. I even posted a comment once about, "What’d you do, fire all the copyeditors and proofreaders–or never hire any?" [...]
Hard to call it a section, but the venerable Wall Street Journal has added sports to its mix, with the debut of one page of sports coverage on page D8 of the March 4 issue. (To the credit of WSJ, however, the Web sports section is quite complete.) The one page was mostly about (boring) [...]