If you are a citizen of the United States of America, you have a little time left to...

VOTE.

Me, I mailed in my absentee ballot on October 14-the same day as the Canadian federal election. This time around, I voted with a great deal of hope and enthusiasm, especially compared to the grim determination of four years ago. This time, I think my vote ( Read more... )

If you're Canadian, this would be a good time to…

VOTE.

A message with the following subject line showed up in two of my inboxen this morning:
FELICITATION VOUS AVEZ GAGNE LA SOMME DE 150.000 EURO (ceci n'est pas un spam)

Now, I would really prefer it if René Magritte would stop sending me this kind of message altogether. L'Office québécois de la langue française, on the other hand, would simply like ( Read more... )

A newsreader on CBC Radio One has just seen fit to reassure us that, despite today's worrisome financial developments in the States, things look rather better "north of the forty-ninth parallel." This is not terribly comforting if you consider that the TSX is somewhere around 43º, and the Bourse de Montréal circa 45º.

The world has come a long way in the past third of a century or so. In 1975, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place had the following to say about widows and widowers:

Surely a bereaved husband and a bereaved wife are equivalent: they have both undergone the loss of a mate. But in fact, linguistically at any rate, this is not true. It is ( Read more... )

Sherry Stern, writing in the Los Angeles Times, and reprinted in my morning paper, tells us:
The creator of the popular comic strip For Better or for Worse has had a change of heart - literally and figuratively - and won't be retiring after all.

As it turns out, "literally and figuratively" seems to mean something more like "in two slightly ( Read more... )

Is it soap? Or is it a phone sex line?

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You've probably already read more than enough about the drawing of Barack and Michelle Obama that recently appeared on the cover of The New Yorker. I don't really have anything to add to that discussion, except to say that I wish more of the people who wrote about it had (as Arnold Zwicky at Language Log did) bothered to note the title of the piece ( Read more... )

Every now and then, an article in my morning newspaper will call to mind scenes of high fantasy presumably uncontemplated by the journalist who wrote it. Consider for example the following sentence, from a piece by Tim Harper, of the Star's Washington bureau, speculating about potential vice-presidential candidates for the upcoming election in the ( Read more... )