A site to help make English grammar more understandable without dumbing down either its significance or its usage.
If the blogosphere and gritty online "citizen journalists" hadn't already exposed the dearth and death of mainstream journalism (and its crass manipulation of reality), then last night's ESPN special called, if I recall correctly, "The Decision," certainly put the final nail in the coffin. I'm referring, of course, to that overblown, downright insulting one-hour TV [...]
The most celebrated novel of the 20th century, Ulysses, and its author, James Joyce, are celebrated each June 16 on what's called "Bloomsday." The "Bloom" part comes from the central character in Ulysses, who was named Leopold Bloom, and the date from the day in which the novel's 24-hour narration takes place, June 16, 1904. [...]
Turns out our neighbors to the north have quite a (sarcastic) sense of humor about them. You have to read the article and then at least the first ten comments to get the true joy out of this reading experience (read Rhino especially): BEWARE THE KILLER HOT DOGS
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Who will save us? Who will save book publishing? What will save the newspapers? What means 'save'? If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over. If by save you mean, "who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys [...]
Actually, I don't have ten, but it's a nice number to project authority on a subject matter, which is why using lists and touting them in a blog post's title helps make the thing go viral. I guess people cannot digest paragraphs, or good ol' expository writing or–heaven help us!–essays anymore. They need lists, so [...]
Earlier, the Oxford Dictionary named unfriend the Word of the Year, and now the American Dialect Society has proclaimed google (lower case for Web searches) as the Word of the Decade. Bing, the Microsoft search engine, has chimed in by announcing that Twitter was the most popular word of 2009. What does all this mean? [...]
I guess it’s best to start with the positive (no plural). At least disgraced baseball slugger Mark McGwire had the courage to own up to his steroid abuse–partially anyway. In admitting yesterday that he had used steroids (whose names he conveniently couldn’t remember), McGwire fell back on what has now become the number-one cop-out defense [...]
College and universities have long required applicants to write essays to evaluate their ability to reason and use the English language effectively. However, what on earth would answers to any of these questions ever reveal on the reasoning side: How do you feel about Wednesday? (University of Chicago, 2002) Are we alone? (Tufts, 2009) Make [...]
First we had Roger Clemens and his use of misremembers, and now the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen unfriend as its Word of the Year. The dictionary defines unfriend this way: "To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook." What next, "I unlove you and want a divorce"?