Anyone who has paid much attention to the Language Log’s occasional examinations of prescriptivism and style manuals and such will have noticed a few truisms that come up again and again:

1. People who write very well sometimes say silly things when they try to advise others on how to write well.
2. People who give advice on writing do not always follow ( Read more... )

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...and tell sad stories about the King of Pop. That's certainly what CBC Radio's been doing for the past couple of days, anyway. (Word is they no longer have funding for chairs over there.)

Oddly enough, I, too, have a sad story about Michael Jackson to tell. I've never been interested in the type of music he made, and I didn't pay particular ( Read more... )

Poll

A few of you may recall from a couple of weeks ago a certain brouhaha, a bit of a to-do, about how Amazon.com suddenly failed to display various works related to lesbians and gays in search results. One of the big questions, of course, was whether it would be plausible as well as charitable to attribute this "glitch" to incompetence rather than ( Read more... )

"Abhorrent" is the word that President Barack Obama used to describe the new Afghan law that denies women certain extremely basic rights, such as the right to leave their houses on a whim, or the right to decline to have sex with their husbands. This law would, in effect, place all Afghan women under a particularly malign form of house arrest in ( Read more... )

It is an ancient and noble tradition, among certain newspapers, to mark the first day of April by sneaking a fanciful work of fiction into their otherwise reliable pages. One of my favourite examples of the genre is the Guardian's classic 1977 article on the island nation of San Seriffe (comprising the islands of Upper and Lower Caisse, and ruled ( Read more... )

Farhad Manjoo, reviewing some new Web browsers in the New York Times, has the following to say about the latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer:
It's speedy, it seems inured to crashes, and not only does it match its rivals' features - in some cases, I.E. beats them.

I suppose it would be inured to crashes by now; the question is, should ( Read more... )

Since I intend to get on a plane tomorrow, I thought I'd see what my daily newspaper (online edition) had to say about what the weather has in store for us, which turned out to include the following sentence:
There are just 11 days left in 2008, but the most precipitous year on record is far from over.

I'm not sure I would-or could-have used "most ( Read more... )

I've been listening to CBC Radio 1 and watching the returns on the New York Times' Web site. The radio just said that Obama is now officially believed to have won, and played some audio of cheering crowds in Chicago... and then as I listened, I realized that not all the cheers were coming from the radio. People are cheering in the streets here in ( Read more... )